We turned suddenly into a little narrow wynd, and pulled up, the driver saying, “There is the Father, yer honour!” In a moment up came a tall, very fine-looking ecclesiastic, quite the best dressed and most distinguished-looking priest I have yet seen in Ireland, with features of a fine Teutonic type, and the erect bearing of a soldier.  I jumped down to greet him, and he proposed that we should walk together to his house near by.  An extremely good house I found it to be, well placed in the most interesting quarter of the town.  Having it in my mind to drive on from Youghal to Lismore, there to make an early dinner, see the castle of the Duke of Devonshire, and return to Cork by an evening train, I had to decline Father Keller’s cordial hospitalities, but he gave me a most interesting hour with him in his comfortable study.  Father Keller stands firmly by the position which earned for him a sentence of imprisonment last year, when he refused to testify before a court of justice in a bankruptcy case, on the ground that it might “drift him into answers which would disclose secrets he was bound in honour not to disclose.”  He does not accept the view taken of his conduct, however, by Lord Selborne, that, in the circumstances, his refusal is to be regarded as the act of his ecclesiastical superiors rather than his own.  He maintains it as his own view of the sworn duty of a priest, and not unnaturally therefore he looks upon his sentence as a blow levelled at the clergy; nor, as I understood him, has he abandoned his original contention, that the Court had no right to summon him as a witness.  It was impossible to listen to him on this subject, and doubt his entire good faith, nor do I see that he ought to be held responsible for the interpretation put by Mr. Lane, M.P., and others upon his attitude as a priest, in a sense going to make him merely a “martyr” of Home Rule.  I did not gather from what he said that, in his mind, the question of his relations with the Nationalists or the Plan of Campaign entered into that affair at all, but simply that he believed the right and the duty of a priest to protect, no matter at what cost to himself, secrets confided to him as a priest, was really involved in his consent or refusal to answer, when he was asked whether he was or was not on a certain day at the “Mall House” in Youghal.  Of course from the connection of this refusal in this particular case with the Nationalist movement, Nationalists would easily glide into the idea that he refused to testify in order to serve their cause.

As to the troubles on the Ponsonby estate, Father Keller spoke very freely.  He divided the responsibility for them between the untractableness of the agent, and the absenteeism of the owner.  It was only since the troubles began, he said, that he had ever seen Mr. Ponsonby, who lived in Hampshire, and was therefore out of touch with the condition and the feelings of the people here.  In a personal interview with him he had found Mr. Ponsonby a kindly disposed Englishman, but the estate is heavily encumbered, and the agent who has had complete control of it forced the tenants, by his hard and fast refusal of a reasonable reduction more than two years ago, into an initial combination to defend themselves by “clubbing” their rents.  That was before Mr. Dillon announced the Plan of Campaign at all.