saw the delicacy of his conduct.  You don’t think, do you, that these poor souls are incapable of appreciating delicacy?  God only knows how far down into their depths of misery and degradation the sweetness of that delicacy descends.  It haunts the drunkard’s dreams, and breathes a breath of purity into the bosom of the abandoned.  That is the power of a noble innocence, a respect for our fellow creatures—­glib phrases, but how little understood and acted on!  With my father it was quite natural....  He was a hot hater, though, I can tell you.  He hated hypocrisy, he hated lying, and he hated presumption and pretentiousness.  He loved sincerity, truth, and modesty.  It seemed as if he felt sure that, with these virtues, the others could not fail to be present.  Was he far wrong?  Yet how many people would have thought him stern!

One dear old cousin of his comes to my mind.  We called him U.T., that is Uncle Tom.  He was not our uncle—­we never had one—­but the uncle of our predecessors at Kirk Braddan.  And almost every Sunday evening he spent at the Vicarage—­poor old thing!  He was quite silent.  One thing, though, he would say, as “regglar as clockwork.”  My mother occasionally apologised for the evening being so exclusively musical (we were great singers).  Whenever she did so, the reply was prompt from U.T.:  “I’m passionately fond of music.”  This, to us children, was highly ludicrous.  Indeed, my mother was amused—­she had no Manx blood in her—­but my father accepted U.T.’s assurance with the utmost confidence.  His chivalrous nature, more deeply tinged than hers with Celtic tenderness, or the very finest kind of Celtic make-believe (Anglice—­humbug; oh those English!), had no difficulty in accepting U.T.’s “passionately.” Passion in U.T.!  Well, to us it was a splendid joke.  I sometimes wonder whether the vicar, too, at times, had lucid intervals of the bare, naked reality.  He had a fine sense of humour, and he would have considered it a baseness to laugh at the poor thing, with its pretence of passion, trying to screen its forlornness.  What U.T. felt was not the passion for music, but just the soothing, comforting sense of being at home with us, of being accepted as one of ourselves, of not being “scoulded,” of indisputable respectability, of being thought capable of “passion,” even so ethereal a passion as that of music.  How blessed those hours must have been to U.T.!  He sometimes missed them.  But it never was my father’s fault.  Was it U.T.’s?  Well, we children had no idea that he drank.  But now, of course, I know that when U.T. did not appear on a Sunday, he must have been “hard at it” on Saturday; and into the kingdom of heaven he must have taken the Sundays, not the Saturdays.

Forgive all this.  But I have been so much touched with your taking up my reference to the dear old Vicar of Braddan that I could not help extending the portrait a little.

And for the backsliders, the “weak brethren, the outcasts—­aw! let’s feel for the lek, and ‘keep a houl’ o’ their ban.’”