The Rector did, as I have said, after his hot-tempered way, love my father, and when my father told him that he had lost some of his income and could no longer stay in the parish, where he was, paid but a pittance, the Rector worked himself into a rage and refused to bid him good bye. Yet, some years afterwards, when my father preached in some Cathedral, he saw his old Rector coming towards him with outstretched hands, to suggest that he have the sermon printed and published. The letters of English women are mostly dull, they are too ceremonious for the ease and freshness of letter writing. Irish women take life gaily & themselves lightly, with no latent puritanism and its suggestion of self-importance, to retard their pens. My mother's letters were a joy to all her family, and my father wrote copiously and eloquently. I remember every letter by either of them would end with the words 'burn this,' and the injunction was too well carried out. I don't think that of all these letters there is even one extant. Nothing delighted my father more than to write speeches and letters for his friends. Sometimes they were business letters, but more often speeches for some family gathering--perhaps there had been a quarrel, and all the clans were to meet at a marriage. The difficulty was to make a speech that would offend nobody and might reconcile their differences. My father would undertake the task with the greatest animation, and as he would not go himself to the wedding, others would come and tell him of the wonderful cleverness of the speaker, and how surprised they were, and of the blessed effects, and he and my mother would keep the secret. All my father's life he lacked companionship, and he of all men the most companionable. There was no one with whom he could exchange ideas. He was surrounded by good men and good women, but for a man of intellect that is not enough. I think that, though but a boy, I was nearer being his companion than anybody else; I at least had mental curiosity. All the grown-up people lay fast bound in the sleep of comfortable orthodoxy, anxious about this world, but persuaded that the less they thought about the world to come the better. Was it not all set out in the Bible and quite clear to those having faith? Romantic temper and high vitality had endowed my father with a natural intrepidity. When therefore cholera came to Ireland where it attained a mortality higher than anywhere else in the Kingdom, he went fearlessly among the people, consoling them with religious hope and comforting them also in many secular ways. I have been told that again and again he would take the sick man in his arms, and hold him up, as he prayed and administered the Sacrament, and this at a time when cholera was supposed to be virulently infectious. This was never forgotten to him in the parish. The poor have long memories.