CHAPTER V. "And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, "Oh, I have suffered With them that I saw suffer,—a brave vessel, AMONG "the strange fellows that nature hath formed in her time," she had seldom formed a stranger than the individual who now begins to take a prominent part in the incidents of our memoir. The Reverend Eneas M'Loughlin was in person tall and bony, his rusty black coat, worse made than even his own ungainly figure, hung on him as if it had been stretched on a clothes-horse for the purpose of being brushed, an operation, however, to which it was seldom subjected. His head and eyes, when engaged in any matter that interested or agitated him, assumed, the former a kind of rotatory, and the latter an oscillating movement, which, it was said, had been caused by an explosion of quicksilver that had taken place in some chemical process he had been engaged in. While looking intently into the crucible, a drop of moisture from some adjacent quarter having inadvertently fallen in, the whole blew up and coated his eyeballs over, leaving them like two convex mirrors, from the consequences of which he was only relieved by the application of the forceps. His mind wandered as far out of the usual course other men's minds take, as his habits of life were at variance with theirs; animal gratifications or creature comforts formed no part of its consideration, further than as they ministered to his existence. He was a perfect walking Encyclopedia of knowledge in all of what may be called the "ologies" of science, though ignorant of all the conventional usages of society; his head was an old curiosity shop crammed with odds and ends of quaint knowledge upon every subject out of the ordinary routine; but in that of the legendary lore of his country it abounded, as well as in its history from the earliest times. He had made excursions into all its parts, examined its cromlechs, cairns, holy wells, and fountains, mounted its round towers, been lost for three days in a fog on M'Gillicuddy's Reek, and shut up for a day and a night in the vaults of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Such was the preceptor engaged to superintend the education of one of the wildest, but not the less tractable spirits that could be found through the length and breadth of the kingdom; of course, he became an object of much curiosity in the neighbourhood, but the person most desirous of scanning his dimensions was Father Malachi Costello, the parish priest of Ballyvoola. He had been an alumnus of St. Omer's, and had brought away from that seminary the courtesy of manner, for which the old Irish priesthood had been remarkable. Being possessed of a small patrimony, he had been enabled during his vacations to visit the principal towns on the Continent; could speak the French language fluently, and had a smattering of German, but beyond the scholastic Latin of the Mass, and the other few books he had read to prepare him for orders, was ignorant of the dead languages. He was a fat, short, rotund personage, with a bright rubicund countenance, the index of good humour, laughter, and joviality, kept a good table, was given to hospitality, and himself an excellent cook; was much beloved, not only by the members of his own, but of the parson's flock, and not only teemed with the humour of his country, but was imbued with its superstitions. Improbable as it may seem, yet the coincidence was a fact, that he, as well as the newly arrived curate, had a visual obstruction in one of his eyes, arising, as 'twas said also, from an accidental circumstance, but which might have been in truth traced to a contingency which in general is more calculated to double the powers of binocular vision than to single them. He had been celebrating a wedding where there had been an abundance of good cheer, and on his return late at night along a cliff road, overhanging a boiling sea below, his horse took fright, and galloping with all speed, neared the brow of the precipice so closely as to cause a total loss of the muscular action of the lid of the eye that had got a sight of the surging element, save on occasions of excitement or temporary anger, when, like the war-gate of the temple of Janus, it opened, only to fall down after the momentary duration of its existence. The Priest had a special aversion to what were called the new-light doctrines of that day, the preachers of which he looked on as a set of canting hypocrites, and imagined the new Curate, as he had just come from the University, where the tenets of John Walker had lately begun to be promulgated, to be imbued with them. The Dominie, on the other hand, being the name given him by his pupils, and by which we shall continue to designate him, looked on all priests with horror; he considered them, in their religious capacity, as a set of ignoramuses, banded together to keep the people in darkness and blindness; and in their secular interferences in the politics and elections of the day, and in the relationships between landlords and tenants, as so many foxes let loose on society, with firebrands tied to their tails. Accordingly, on their first interview at the rectory, the Curate's head began to rotate as if on a pivot, and his eyes to oscillate, as may have been seen on the faces of old clock-dials; while the Priest, on his side, opened his belligerent organ to take a more accurate survey of the extraordinary specimen of humanity that stood before him. There was something, however, in both of their appearances which disarmed hostility, and was calculated to allay the aversion they were ready to bestow on each other, and in a short time they resumed their wonted appearance. The Priest having welcomed his colleague on his arrival among them, and expressed a hope that they would be on as good terms as he and the worthy Rector had been for upwards of twenty years, said, "I presume, reverend sir, that you are of the same old aboriginal stock as many of your name we have in this county." "I imagine, sir," said the Dominie, "we are of the same origin-the old Celtic race that |