This sort of ostrich fury is common enough among the regular drumbeaters of the Irish agitation. But it is not creditable to a "Canadian priest." Still less creditable is his direct arraignment of M. de Mandat Grancey's good faith and veracity upon the strength of what he describes as M. de Mandat Grancey's amplification and distortion of a story told by himself. This was a tale of a priest called out to confess one of his parishioners. The penitent accused himself of killing one man, and trying to kill several others. The priest, as the dreadful tale went on, made a tally on his sleeve, with chalk, of the crimes recited. "Good heavens! my son," he cried at last, "what had all these men done to you that you tried to send them all into eternity? Who were they?" "Oh, Father, they were all bailiffs or tax-collectors!" "You idiot!" exclaimed the confessor, angrily rubbing at his sleeve, "why didn't ye tell me that before instead of letting me spoil my best cassock?" As I happened to have the book of M. de Mandat Grancey in my despatch-box, I compared it with the attack made upon it. The results were edifying. In the first place, M. de Mandat Grancey does not indicate the Canadian priest as his authority. He says that he heard the story, apparently at a dinner-table in France, from a _curé Irlandais_, who was endeavouring to impress upon his hearers "the sympathy of the clergy with the Land League." The "Canadian priest" now comes forward and makes it a count in his indictment against M. de Mandat Grancey that he is described as an "Irish curate," when he is in fact neither an Irishman nor a curate. What was more natural than that an ecclesiastic, claiming to live in Ireland, and telling stories in France about the sympathy of the Irish clergy with the Land League, should be taken by one of his auditors to be an Irish _curé_, particularly as the French _curé_ is, I believe, the equivalent of the Irish "parish priest"? In the next place, the "Canadian priest" declares that the story "is as old as the Round Towers of Ireland," and that M. de Mandat Grancey represents him as making himself the hero of the tale. As a matter of fact, M. de Mandat Grancey does nothing of the kind. On the contrary, he expressly says that the _curé Irlandais_, who told the story, gave it to his hearers as having occurred not to himself at all, but "to one of his colleagues." Furthermore he is at the pains to add (_Chez Paddy_, p. 43) that the story, which was not to the taste of some of the French ecclesiastics who heard it, was related "as a simple pleasantry." "But," he adds, and this I suspect is the sting which has so exasperated the "Canadian priest," "he gave us to understand at the same time that this pleasantry struck the keynote of the state of mind of many Irish priests, and, he said, that he was himself the President of the League in his district."