“I speak Irish quite as well as he does,” said the Sergeant quietly, “and he knows I do.  What I did was to put down in English words what I heard said in Irish.  This I had to do because I have no stenographic signs for the Irish words.”  He tells me he taught himself stenography.

“As for Father M’Fadden,” he said, “he told the people that’ he was the law in Gweedore, and they should heed no other.’  He spoke the truth, too, for he makes himself the law in Gweedore.  He dislikes me because I am a living proof that he is not the only law in Gweedore!” Of the business shrewdness and ability of Father M’Fadden, Sergeant Mahony expressed a very high opinion, though hardly in terms which would have gratified such an ecclesiastic as the late Cardinal Barnabo.  Possibly Cardinal Cullen might have relished them no better.  “Certainly he has the finest house in Gweedore, sir, and what’s more he made it the finest himself.”

“Do you mean that he built it?”

“He did, indeed; and did you not notice the beautiful stone fences he is putting up all about it, and the four farms he has?”

“Then he is certainly a man of substance?”

“And of good substance, sir!  The Government, they gave him a hundred pounds towards the house.  But it was the flood that was the blessed thing for him and made a great man of him!”

“The flood?” I asked, with some natural astonishment; “the flood?  What flood?”

“And did you never hear of the great flood of Gweedore?  It was in August 1880.  You will mind the water that comes down behind the chapel?  Well, there was a flood, and it swelled, and it swelled, and it burst the small pipe there behind the chapel:  too small it was entirely for carrying off’ the great water, and nobody took notice of it, or that there was anything wrong, and so the water was piled up behind the chapel, and at Mass on the Sunday, while the chapel was full, the walls gave way, and the water rushed in, and was nine feet deep.  There were five people that couldn’t get out in time, and were drowned—­two old people and three children, young people.  It was a great flood.  And Father M’Fadden wrote about it—­oh, he is a clever priest with the pen—­and they made a great subscription in London for the poor people and the chapel.  I can’t rightly say how much, but it was in the papers, a matter of seven hundred pounds, I have heard say.  And it was all sent to Father M’Fadden.”

“And it was spent, of course,” I said, “on the repairs of the chapel, or given to the relatives of the poor people who were drowned.”

“Oh, no doubt; very likely it was, sir!  But the repairs of the chapel—­there isn’t a mason in Donegal but will tell you a hundred pounds would not be wanted to make the chapel as good as it ever was.  And for the people that were drowned—­two of them were old people, as I said to you, sir, that had no kith or kin to be relieved, and for the others they were of well-to-do people that would not wish to take anything from the parish.”