James A. McMaster was of Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish parentage.  His name is familiar to our readers as editor of the Freeman’s Journal. Those qualities of aggressive zeal which made McMaster so well known to Catholics of our day were not wholly undeveloped in the tall, angular youth, still a catechumen, and intoxicated with the new wine of Catholic fervor.  Young Mr. Walworth had been made a Catholic but a short time before, and McMaster was received into the Church by the Redemptorists in Third Street, his two young friends being present.  While he was kneeling at the altar, candle in hand, piously reading his profession of faith to Father Rumpler, he accidentally set fire to Father Tschenhens’ hair, one of the fathers assisting at the ceremony.  Walking together afterwards in the little garden of the convent, Father Rumpler said to him:  “Mr. McMaster, you begin well—­setting fire to a priest.”  “Oh,” answered he, “if I don’t set fire to something more than that it will be a pity.”  These new friends of Isaac had applied to enter the Redemptorist novitiate and they had been accepted.  This meant a voyage to Europe, for the congregation had not yet established a novitiate in America.

One Friday, then, during the last days of July—­the exact date we have not been able to discover—­Isaac Hecker was informed by Father Rumpler that Walworth and McMaster would sail for Belgium the evening of the next day.  “I decided to join them,” he said when relating the circumstances afterwards.  “Father Rumpler was favorable, but puzzled.  And I must first present myself to the Provincial, Father de Held, who was in Baltimore.  I arrived in Baltimore at four o’clock in the morning on Saturday, travelling all night.  Father de Held looked at me, as I presented myself, and said that he must take time to consider.  I explained about the departure of the others that day.  He ordered Brother Michael to get me a bowl of coffee from the kitchen, and me to hear his Mass.  I heard the Mass and after that he examined me a little—­asked me to read out of the Following of Christ in Latin, which I did.  He gave me my acceptance, and I rushed back to New York by the half-past eight o’clock morning train.  George had packed my trunk, and I sailed that day with the others.”

The picturesqueness of the group was certainly not lessened by the accession of Isaac Hecker, whose leap to and from Baltimore, though hardly to be expected from a contemplative, was in accord with the sudden energy of his nature.  One who saw him at the time says that “he had the general make-up of a transcendentalist, not excepting his long hair flowing down on his neck.”