“Poor Pat!” Edith said, a little zealously, when the others smiled over the story. “We are not scorning him for his ignorance, my dear,” her uncle replied. “With Charles Lamb, ‘I honor an honest obliquity of understanding,’ and I also honor an honest ignorance of books; but sometimes they are amusing.” “What did I hear you saying to Mr. Yorke, Pat?” Betsey asked the man that evening. “It seemed to me that you were impudent.” “The fact is, I was really mad,” Patrick owned. “I’d been downtown, and there I came across the editor of the _Herald_, and the sight of him roiled me, especially as he grinned and made believe bless himself. I’d like to meet him alone in a quiet bit of woods. I’d soon change his complexion to as beautiful a black and blue as you ever saw--the dirty spalpeen, with his eye like a buttonhole!” Betsey sat on the door-step, and looked up at the stars. “If I’d had the placing of ‘em,” she remarked presently, “I’d have put ‘em in even rows, like pins in a paper. It would look better. They’re dreadfully mixed up now.” Patrick looked into the skies a little while, but his mind was on other things than the marshalling of stars into papers of pins. “I’m sorry Mr. Yorke went to that town-meeting to-night,” he said. Mr. Yorke was, in fact, at that moment rising in the town-hall to speak. The Rev. John Conway had uttered a bitter tirade against the Catholic clergy, with a fierce recapitulation of the affair of Johnny O’Brian, the priest’s boy, and his Douay Bible. Dr. Martin had followed with cooler, but not less bitter, denunciation, and another 162 reference to Johnny O’Brian. A Portuguese barber had made an idiotic speech, and various town-officers, and prominent Know-Nothings, all more or less illiterate, had spoken, and all had seasoned their discourse with Johnny O’Brian. Finally, the Rev. Saul Griffeth had held his hearers spell-bound while he described, in glowing phrases, the inevitable and complicated ruin of the country in case Catholics should be admitted to equal rights, or any rights at all, and had painted a dazzling picture of the country’s future glories should Catholics be excluded. And here again the perennial Johnny O’Brian figured.