"_Au revoir!_" I replied, as I took up my hat and gold-headed cane and set out to interview and reprimand my curate. Clearly, something should be done, and done quickly. There was a good deal of talk abroad, and I was supposed to be sinking into a condition of senile incompetence. It is quite true that I could not challenge my curate's conduct in a single particular. He was in all things a perfect exemplar of a Christian priest, and everything he had done in the parish since his arrival contributed to the elevation of the people and the advancement of religion. But it wouldn't do. Every one said so; and, of course, every one in these cases is right. And yet there was some secret misgiving in my mind that I should do violence to my own conscience were I to check or forbid Father Letheby's splendid work; and there came a voice from my own dead past to warn me: "See that you are not opposing the work of the right hand of the Most High." These were my doubts and apprehensions as I moved slowly along the road that led in a circuitous manner around the village and skirted the path up to the school-house. I woke from my unpleasant reverie to hear the gentle murmur of voices, moving rhythmically as in prayer; and in a short bend of the road I came face to face with the children leaving school. I had been accustomed to seeing these wild, bare-legged mountaineers breaking loose from school in a state of subdued frenzy, leaping up and down the side ditches, screaming, yelling, panting, with their elf-locks blinding their eyes, and their bare feet flashing amid the green of grasses or the brown of the ditch-mould. They might condescend to drop me a courtesy, and then--anarchy, as before. Today they moved slowly, with eyes bent modestly on the ground, three by three, and all chanting in a sweet, low tone--the Rosary. The centre girl was the coryphæus with the "Our Fathers" and "Hail Marys"; the others, the chorus. I stood still in amazement and challenged them:-- "I am happy to see my little children so well employed. How long since you commenced to say the Rosary thus in common?" In a twinkling the solemnity vanished and I was surrounded by a chattering group. "Just a week, Fader; and Fader Letheby, Fader, he tould us of a place where they do be going to work in the morning, Fader, and dey all saying de Rosary togeder, Fader; and den, Fader, we do be saying to ourselves, why shouldn't we, Fader, say de Rosary coming to school, de same as dese Germans, Fader?" "That's excellent," I said, running my eyes over the excited group; "and have you all got beads?" "I have, Fader," said one of the coryphæi, "and de oders do be saying it on their fingers." "I must get beads for every one of you," I said; "and to commence, here, Anstie, is my own." I gave a little brown-eyed child my own mother-of-pearl beads, mounted in silver, and was glad I had it to give. The children moved away, murmuring the Rosary as before.