"Never mind," I said, "you have a great deal to learn yet--with wrinkles and gray hairs. But if you want to keep these raven locks, now wet and dripping, intact, remember, _quieta non movere_! And if you want to keep your face, now smooth and ruddy, but, I regret to say, glistening with rain, free from wrinkles, remember, _quieta non movere_. Take now your frequent altar denunciations of local superstitions,--the eggs found in the garden, and the consequent sterility of the milk, the evil eye and the cattle dying, etc., etc.,--it will take more than altar denunciations, believe me,--it will take years of vigorous education to relegate these ideas into the limbo of exploded fantasies. And the people won't be comfortable without them. You take away the poetry, which is an essential element in the Gaelic character, and you make the people prosaic and critical, which is the worst thing possible for them. Thiggin-thu? But I beg your pardon. You are beyond all that." "It sounds plausible," he said, getting down from the gig; "but it sounds also, pardon the expression, cowardly. However, we'll see!" CHAPTER VII SCRUPLES Captain Campion gave a large dinner party on All-Hallows-Eve. It is a ghostly time; and, in Ireland, every one, even the most advanced and materialistic, feels that the air is full of strange beings, who cannot be accounted for either by the microscope or the scalpel. Father Letheby was invited and went. I was rather glad he did go, for I felt that the village was rather dull for such a brilliant young fellow; and I had a kind of pardonable pride in thinking that he would be fully competent to meet on their own level any pretentious people that might stray hither from more civilized centres. There is hardly, indeed, any great risk of meeting too intellectual people in Ireland just now. The anatomy of a horse is about the term and end of the acquired knowledge of the stronger sex; and the latest ball--well, this won't do! I must suspend this criticism, otherwise I shall wound, and that does not suit an old priest, who is beginning to hear the murmurs of the eternal seas. Father Letheby walked over across the moor to the "Great House." It was growing dark when he left home, and he allowed himself a full hour, as he had to make some calls by the way. One of these calls led him to a house where an old woman was bedridden. Her son, a strong man of thirty years or more, was doing something strange when the priest unexpectedly entered. He was suffering from a scrofulous ulcer in the neck, and it was a hideous disfigurement. He had just been standing before a broken piece of looking-glass, stuck in the rough plaster of the wall; and he hastily hid something as the priest entered. Father Letheby's suspicions were instantly aroused. And he said hastily,--for he detested anything like concealment,-- "What have you been doing?" "Nothing, your reverence," said the peasant, nervously. "Then, what are you hiding?" said Father Letheby.