The tiny village of Annagh lies on the eastern slope of the Slievenamoe Mountains, about fifteen miles due east of Ballybor, and consists of one dirty street with, roughly, forty-nine miserable tumble-down hovels and one grand slated two-storied house, as usual the shop and abode of the village gombeen man, who also kept the Post Office—not because he was the most honest man in the village, but because there was nobody else able to do so. A good many years ago, on a bitter winter’s night, a tinker, answering to the name of Bernie M’Andrew, drove his ass-cart into the village of Annagh, and called at the only shop to know if there were any kettles or cans to be mended. The night was so cold and wet that the old shopkeeper, in the kindness of his heart, bade the shivering tinker put up his ass and spend the night. The tinker stayed and never left. M’Andrew’s stock-in-trade, when he arrived at Annagh on that winter’s night, consisted of half a barrel of salt herrings, a kettle, the usual tinker’s soldering outfit, a policeman’s discarded tunic, and the rags he stood up in. Within a year M’Andrew had buried the old shopkeeper, who had lived alone for years and was beloved by all, and reigned in his place. Being an ambitious tinker, M’Andrew started a gombeen business with the old man’s savings, which he found by chance in the secret drawer of an old desk, and in a very short time became the best hated and most feared man in the district. At first M’Andrew supported Sinn Fein enthusiastically, but when he saw law and order beginning to disappear, being now a man of property, he became alarmed, and tried to run with the hare and the hounds. M’Andrew’s great opponent was the young parish priest, Father John, who, after serving as a chaplain with the British Army in France with great distinction—he had been decorated for bravery in the field by both the British and the French—returned to Ireland, having seen enough bloodshed for his lifetime. Father John was a grand man both physically and morally and in the right sense of the words, and if only the majority of young Irish priests were up to the standard of Father John there would be little trouble in Ireland to-day. When he became the parish priest of Annagh, Father John saw at once that M’Andrew was fast reducing the great majority of his parishioners, who were poor men with poorer mountain land, to a state of slavery, and realised that it only wanted two bad years in succession to put the whole parish under the gombeen man’s thumb. At first he tried to keep the farmers away from M’Andrew’s shop; but this they resented, as it entailed a journey of many miles to the nearest town, and then they had to pay nearly as much as to M’Andrew. Next he denounced M’Andrew and his evil practices from the altar, warning the people of the consequences; but in spite of all the priest could do or say the gombeen man flourished.