There are certain standard truisms that must be rediscovered by each successive generation (possibly because they have bored the preceding one to extinction), and Larry was of the age at which truisms reveal themselves as new ideas, and sing and shine with the radiancy of morning stars.  He was also young enough, and just sufficiently interested in religion, to find it exciting to denounce it.  The fervour of his indictment lifted him from his chair, and he stood, with the evening light on his hot face, enjoying his theme, and his audience.

“I stayed with some people in England last holidays, friends of my people’s; Protestants they were, too—­Sour-faces,’ as the ‘Leader’ calls them!—­and they didn’t give a blow what religion I was!  That was my affair, they thought—­and so it was, too!  Not like this crowd here—­I don’t mean my own people, you know,” he added hastily, “they’re all right!”

“Oh, I’m sure!” said Barty, in instant assent.

“I hate England, of course,” continued the student of The Spirit of the Nation, hurriedly, “but I must say I get sick of this eternal blackguarding of Catholics by Protestants, and Protestants by Catholics—­”

“Ah, they don’t mean it half the time!” put in Barty, pacifically; “it’s just a trick they have!”

“Well, I don’t care,” said Larry, who didn’t like being interrupted, with a fling of his head; “they shouldn’t do it!  I hear people shutting up when I come into the room—­just as if I didn’t jolly well know they were abusing the priests or something like that.  And if they only knew it, I don’t care a curse how much they abuse them!”

He took an angry pull at his cigarette, glaring at the unoffending Barty. “’’Tisn’t the man I respects, ‘tis the office!’ That’s what Mrs. Twomey said, when I was chaffing her for dragging gravel up from the river to put in front of her house, because the priest, whom she loathes, was going to have a ‘station’ there!”

The orator paused for breath, as well as for the duty of keeping his cigarette alight.

“Well, and isn’t she quite right, too?” said Barty.  “I’ve no great fancy for Father Greer, but that doesn’t affect my feeling for the Church.”

He rose, and resting his elbows on the window-sill, leaned out into the still air.

“By Jingo!  You don’t often see the beat o’ that for a sky!  Look at it, Larry.  There’s Orange and Green for you, if you like!  God!  I wish we could get them to work together like that!”

One of those transformation scenes that sometimes follow on an overcast and rainy day, was happening in the west.  The sun had sunk behind the hills, the grey clouds had vanished; the higher heaven was green, clear and pale, but low in the west, long and fleecy rollers of golden cloud lay in a sea of burning orange.

At about the same time, the golden stream that had flowed so generously from Mrs. Mangan’s purse, had failed, and Mrs. Mangan, her arms full of the fruit of those Christian graces of Faith, Hope and Charity, that are indispensable to the success of a bazaar, was asking Evans to order for her her “caw,” by which term she indicated the vehicle that had conveyed her to the scene of her triumph.