A very brief conversation enabled me to learn that Mr. Dudgeon came to the parish on his marriage, about four-and-twenty years before, and neither he nor his wife had ever left it since. They had no neighbors, and only six parishioners of their own persuasion. The church was about a mile off, and not easily approached in bad weather. It seemed, too, that the bishop and Mr. D. were always at war. The diocesan was a Whig, and the parson a violent Orangeman, who loved loyal anniversaries, demonstrations, and processions, the latter of which came twice or thrice a year from Derry to visit him and stir up any amount of bitterness and party strife; and though the Rev. Dan, as he was familiarly called, was obliged to pass the long interval between these triumphant exhibitions exposed to the insolence and outrage of the large masses he had offended, be never blinked the peril, but actually dared it, wearing his bit of orange ribbon in his button-hole as he went down the village, and meeting Father Lafferty's scowl with a look of defiance and insult fierce as his own. After years of episcopal censure and reproof, administered without the slightest amendment,--for Dan never appeared at a visitation, and none were hardy enough to follow him into his fastness,--he was suffered to do what he pleased, and actually abandoned as one of those hopeless cases which time alone can clear off and remedy. An incident, however, which had befallen about a couple of years back, had almost released the bishop from his difficulty. In an affray following on a twelfth of July demonstration, a man had been shot; and though the Rev. Dan was not in any degree implicated in the act, some imprudent allusion to the event in his Sunday's discourse got abroad in the press, and was so severely commented on by a young barrister on the trial, that an inhibition was issued against him, and his church closed for three months. I have been, thus far, prolix in sketching the history of those with whom I was now to be domesticated, because, once placed before the reader, my daily life is easily understood. We sat over the fire nearly all day, abusing the Papists, and wondering if England would ever produce one man who could understand the fact that unless you banished the priests and threw down the chapels there was no use in making laws for Ireland. Then we dined, usually on fish, and a bit of bacon, after which we drank the glorious, pious, and immortal memory, with the brass money, the wooden shoes, and the rest of it,--the mild Lizzy herself being “told off” to recite the toast, as her father had a sore throat and could n't utter; and the fair, gentle lips, that seldom parted save to smile, delivered the damnatory clause against all who would n't drink that toast, and sentenced them to be “rammed, jammed, and crammed,” as the act declares, in a way that actually amazed me.