at Ardara, but of cash on deposit in the Northern Bank to the very respectable amount of L23,711.  Mrs. O’Connor contested the will.  The Archbishop of Armagh, and Father Sheridan, C.C. of Letterkenny, instituted an action against her to establish the will.  Father M’Fadden of Gweedore, lying in Londonderry jail as a first-class misdemeanant, was brought from Londonderry as a witness for the niece.  But on the trial of the case it appeared that there was actually no evidence to sustain the plea of the niece that “undue influence” had been exerted upon her uncle by the Archbishop, who at the time of the making of the will was Bishop of Raphoe, or by anybody else; so the judge instructed the jury to find on all the issues for the plaintiffs, which was done.  The judge declared the conduct of the defendant in advancing a charge of “undue influence” in such circumstances against ecclesiastics to be most reprehensible; but the Archbishop very graciously intimated through his lawyer his intention of paying the costs of the niece who had given him all this trouble, because she was a poor woman who had been led into her course by disappointment at receiving so small a part of so large an inheritance.  Had the priest’s property come to him in any other way than through his office as a priest her claim might have been more worthy of consideration, but Mr. M’Dermot, Q.C., who represented the Archbishop, took pains to make it clear that as an ecclesiastic his client, who had nothing to do with the making of the will, was bound to regard it “as proper and in accordance with the fitness of things that what had been received from the poor should be given back to the poor.”

I see no adequate answer to this contention of the Archbishop.  But it certainly goes to confirm the estimates given me by Sergeant Mahony of Father M’Fadden’s receipts at Gweedore, and the opinion expressed to me by Lord Lucan as to the average returns of an average Catholic parish, that the priest of Milford, a place hardly so considerable as Gweedore, should have acquired so handsome a property in the exercise there of his parochial functions.

One form in which the priests in many parts of Ireland collect dues is certainly unknown to the practice of the Church elsewhere, I believe, and it must tend to swell the incomes of the priests at the expense, perhaps, of their legitimate influence.  This is the custom of personal collections by the priests.  In many parishes the priest stands by the church-door, or walks about the church—­not with a bag in his hand, as is sometimes done in France on great occasions when a quele is made by the cure for some special object,—­but with an open plate in which the people put their offerings.  I have heard of parishes in which the priest sits by a table near the church-door, takes the offerings from the parishioners as they pass, and comments freely upon the ratio of the gift to the known or presumed financial ability of the giver.