“Unquestionably, sir, I shall do myself the honor.”

“Very well,” replied the old squire, clearing up at once—­undergoing, in fact, one of those rapid and unaccountable changes which constituted so prominent a portion of his character.  “Very well, Bobby; good-by, my boy; I am not angry with you; shake hands, and curse Popery.”

Until the morning of the day on which the two rivals were to meet, Miss Folliard began to entertain a dreadful apprehension that the fright into which the Red Rapparee had thrown her father was likely to terminate, ere long, in insanity.  The man at best was eccentric, and full of the most unaccountable changes of temper and purpose, hot, passionate, vindictive, generous, implacable, and benevolent.  What he had seldom been accustomed to do, he commenced soliloquizing aloud, and talking to himself in such broken hints and dark mysterious allusions, drawing from unknown premises such odd and ludicrous inferences; at one time brushing himself up in Scripture; at another moment questioning his daughter about her opinion on Popery—­sometimes dealing about political and religious allusions with great sarcasm, in which he was a master when he wished, and sometimes with considerable humor of illustration, so far, at least, as he could be understood.

“Confound these Jesuits,” said he; “I wish they were scourged out of Europe.  Every man of them is sure to put his finger in the pie and then into his mouth to taste what it’s like; not so the parsons—­Hallo! where am I?  Take care, old Folliard; take care, you old dog; what have you to say in favor of these same parsons—­lazy, negligent fellows, who snore and slumber, feed well, clothe well, and think first of number one?  Egad, I’m in a mess between them.  One makes a slave of you, and the other allows you to play the tyrant.  A plague, as I heard a fellow say in a play once, a plague o’ both your houses:  if you paid more attention to your duties, and scrambled less for wealth and power, and this world’s honors, you would not turn it upside down as you do.  Helen!”

“Well, papa.”

“I have doubts whether I shall allow you to sound Reilly on.  Popery.”

“I would rather decline it, sir.”

“I’ll tell you what; I’ll see Andy Cummiskey—­Andy’s opinion is good on any thing.”  And accordingly he proceeded to see his confidential old servant.  With this purpose, and in his own original manner, he went about consulting every servant under his roof upon their respective notions of Popery, as he called it, and striving to allure them, at one time by kindness, and at another by threatening them, into an avowal of its idolatrous tendency.  Those to whom he spoke, however, knew very little about it, and, like those of all creeds in a similar predicament, he found that, in proportion to their ignorance of its doctrines, arose the vehemence and sincerity of their defence of it.  This, however, is human nature, and we