Therefore it was that Larry’s right hand was seldom on his handle-bar, as he skimmed through the people, decent and dark-dressed in their Sunday best, who saluted with a long-established friendship and respect this solitary representative of their traditional enemies, the landlords.

There cannot be in the world a people more unfailingly church-going than those sons and daughters of Rome who are bred in Southern Ireland.  Larry looked down, from his pew in the gallery, at the close ranks of kneeling figures, and thought with compunction how long it was since he had been in a church, and thanked God that he had come home to his own people, and that their religion was his.  He followed the words of the service with a new realisation of their ancient beauty.  He trembled with an unfamiliar emotion, as, in the charged silence of the crowded chapel, the bell tinkled and the censer clashed, sounds that have in them at such moments a heart-shaking power, magnetic, mystical.  He heard nothing of the sermon; in his eager mind two thoughts raced side by side, now one, now the other, leading.  These two marvels that had befallen.  That Christian should love him; this had the mastery, irradiating all; but with the vivid sense of fellowship and communion that the service brought the other thought, the old dream that was coming true of standing for these people, of making their interests his, their welfare his care, moved him profoundly.

Outside in the chapel yard, after the service, the congregation was in no hurry to disperse.  Larry looked about him, and found many friendly eyes set on him.  Larry, too, had a friendly heart, and he bethought him that, as a future M.P., he should lose no opportunity of intercourse with his constituents.  He recognised the solid presence of John Herlihy, an elderly farmer who had been one of the largest of his own late tenants, and he went across the yard to where he stood and shook hands with him.

“Fine day, John!  Good and hot for the harvest!  Got your threshing done yet?”

“’Tis very warm, sir,” answered John Herlihy, correcting, as is invariable, Larry’s employment of the vulgar adjective “hot”; “very warm entirely, and sure I have my corn threshed this ten days, the same as yourself!”

“Nothing like taking time by the fetlock, is there, John!” chaffed Larry (who, until that moment, had been unaware that he possessed any corn); “it’s a good harvest all round, isn’t it?”

“Well, pretty fair, thank God!”

“And the country’s quiet?”

“Never better, sir, never better!” responded John Herlihy, weightily; but something in his cool eyes, grey and wise as a parrot’s, impelled Larry, in his new-born sense of responsibility, to further questioning.

Mr. John Herlihy was a man of the order to whom the label “respectable” inevitably attaches itself (that adjective which acts as a touch-stone in the definition of class, and is a compliment up to a certain point, an offence higher up the scale); one of those sound and sensible and thrifty farmers who are the strength of Ireland, and are as the stones of a break-water, over which the storm-froth of the waters of politics sweeps unheeded.