The notions which the peasantry entertain of a priest’s learning are as extravagant as they are amusing, and such, indeed, as would be too much for the pedantic vanity inseparable from a half-educated man to disclaim.  The people are sufficiently reasonable, however, to admit gradations in the extent of knowledge acquired by their pastors; but some of the figures and illustrations which they use in estimating their comparative merits are highly ludicrous.  I remember a young man, who, at the age of twenty-two, set about preparing himself for the church.  He lived in the bosom of a mountain, whose rugged breast he cultivated with a strength proportioned to the difficulty of subduing it.  He was a powerful young fellow, quiet and inoffensive in his manners, and possessed of great natural talents.  It was upon a Monday morning, in the month of June, that the school-room door opened a foot and a half wider than usual, and a huge, colossal figure stalked in, with a kind of bashful laugh upon his countenance, as if conscious of the disproportion betwixt his immense size and that of the other schoolboys.  His figure, without a syllable of exaggeration, was precisely such as I am about to describe.  His height six feet, his shoulders of an enormous breadth, his head red as fire; his body-coat made after the manner of his grandfather’s—­the skirts of it being near his heels—­and the buttons behind little less than eighteen inches asunder.  The pockets were cut so low, that when he stretched his arm to its full length, his fingers could not get further than the flaps; the breast of it was about nine inches longer than was necessary, so that when he buttoned it, he appeared all body.  He wore no cravat, nor was his shirt-collar either pinned or buttoned, but lay open as if to disclose an immense neck and chest scorched by the sun into a rich and healthy scarlet.  His chin was covered with a sole of red-dry bristles, that appeared to have been clipped about a fortnight before; and as he wore neither shoe nor stocking, he exhibited a pair of legs to which Rob Roy’s were drumsticks.  They gave proof of powerful strength, and the thick fell of bristly hair with which they were covered argued an amazing hardihood of constitution and tremendous physical energy.

“Sure, Masther, I’m comin’ to school to you!” were the first words he uttered.

Now there ran beneath the master’s solemnity of manner a broad but shallow under-current of humor, which agreed but poorly with his pompous display of learning.  On this occasion his struggle to retain the grave and overcome the ludicrous was unavailing.  The startling fact thus uncouthly announced by so grotesque a candidate for classical knowledge occasioned him to receive the intelligence with more mirth than was consistent with good breeding.  His pupils, too, who were hitherto afraid to laugh aloud, on observing his countenance dilate into an expression of laughter which he could not conceal, made the roof of the house ring with their mirth.