P. A. SHEEHAN.

(1852)

THE REV. P. A. SHEEHAN was born at Mallow on March 17, 1852, and was educated at Maynooth College. For some time he served on the English mission at Exeter. He was recalled to his native diocese of Cloyne in Ireland, where he was attached to the Cathedral of Queenstown for eight years. In 1895 he was appointed parish priest of Doneraile. Besides many contributions in prose and verse to periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, he has published 'Geoffrey Austin, Student,' The Triumph of Failure,' My New Curate,' a most successful novel, and Luke Delmege,' also a novel. 'My New Curate' has been translated into many languages.

ALBION.

From 'Luke Delmege.'

Not the white cliffs of Dover, but the red loam of Devonshire downs, where the sandstone was capped by the rich teeming soil, saluted our young exile the following morning. He had risen early, and, shaking off the mephitis of a stuffy cabin, had rushed above, just as the sailors were swabbing the decks. Here he drew in long, deep breaths of the crisp, cool sea air, as he watched the furrows cut by the coulter of the sea-plow, or studied the white towns that lay so picturesquely under the ruddy cliffs. "And this is England," Luke thought. England, the far-reaching, the imperial, whose power is reverenced by white, and black, and bronzed races; and whose sovereignty stretches from the peaks of the Himalayas to the Alps of the southern archipelagoes." Luke couldn't understand it. She lay so quiet there in the morning sun, her landscapes stretched so peaceful and calm, that symbol of power, or of might far-reaching, there was none.

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"I thought," said Luke, aloud, "that every notch in her cliffs was an embrasure, and that the mouths of her cannon were like nests in her rocks."

""T is the lion couchant et dormant," said a voice.

Luke turned and saw standing close by an officer of the ship, a clean-cut, trim, well-defined figure, clad in the blue cloth and gold lace of the service. His face, instead of the

red and bronze of the sailor, had an olive tinge, through which burned two glowing, gleaming brown eyes, which just then were sweeping the coast, as if in search of a signal.

"I have often had the same thoughts as you, sir," he said, as if anxious to continue the conversation, "as we swept along here under more troublous skies and over more turbulent seas than now. It is the silent and sheathed strength of England that is terrible. I have seen other powers put forth all their might by land and sea: I have not been moved. But I never approach the English coast without a feeling of awe."

"I dare say it is something to be proud of," said Luke, who was appreciative of this enthusiasm, but did not share it.

"Perhaps not," the officer replied; "it is destiny."

"You see the Cornish coast," he continued, pointing to a dim haze far behind them, in which the outlines of the land were faintly penciled. "Would you believe that up to the dawn of our century, fifty years ago, that entire peninsula was Catholic? They had retained the Catholic faith from the times of the Reformation. Then there were no priests to be had; Wesley went down, and to-day they are the most bigoted Dissenters in England; and Cornwall will be the last county that will come back to the Church."

"Horrible!" said Luke, sadly.

"And yet so thin is the veneering of Protestantism that their children are still called by the names of Catholic saints, Angela, and Ursula, and Teresa; and they have as many holy wells as you have in Ireland."

"It must be a heart-break to the priests," said Luke, "who have to minister amid such surroundings."

"I only speak of it as a matter of Fate," said the officer, dreamily. "It is the terrific power of assimilation which Protestant England possesses."

"You must be proud of your great country," said Luke. "No, sir," said the officer, "I am not."

Luke looked at him with surprise.

"Ireland is my country," the officer said in reply, "and these are our countrymen." He pointed down into the lower deck, where, lying prostrate in various degrees of

intoxication, were four or five cattle-dealers. They had sought out the warmth of the boiler during the night; and there lay, unwashed and unkempt, in rather uninviting conditions. Their magnificent cattle, fed on Irish pastures, were going to feed the mouths of Ireland's masters, and tramped and lowed and moaned in hideous discord for food, and clashed their horns together as the vessel rolled on the waves. It was altogether an unpleasant exhibition, and Luke turned away with a sigh.

In the early afternoon, the boat, after sheering close under the Eddystone lighthouse, swept around the beautiful woodlands and shrublands of Mount Edgcumbe, and the splendid panorama of Plymouth harbor burst on the view. Here again Luke was disappointed. Everything looked so calm, and peaceful, and prosperous, that he found it difficult to understand that there to the left was one of the greatest dockyards and marine emporiums and storehouses in the world; and his eye ranged along until, hidden under the bosky covers and the abundant foliage of Mount Edgcumbe, he saw a long, low wall of concrete, and there were the bulldog mouths of England's cannon. "Going ashore, sir?" said the chief mate, the officer who had previously accosted him.

"No," said Luke, dubiously.

"Let me introduce my wife and little girl, sir," he said politely. "We are running in, as I am leaving Marguerite with the Notre Dame nuns here."

"You are going further, Father?" said the lady, with frankly polite Irish manner.

"Yes," said Luke, "I'm going to London. I have a sister Margaret also," he said, tenderly watching the child's eyes," but we call her Margery."

"We shall be lonely after our little woman," said the officer; "but she will be in safe hands."

"Do you know what Marguerite means, little one?" said Luke.

"No, Father," said the child.

"It means a pearl. Be thou," he said, assuming a tone of unwonted solemnity, "a pearl of great price."

"Bless her, Father," said the Catholic mother.

And Luke blessed the child.

All that day, whenever he had a spare moment from his

Office and a few necessary studies, he was absorbed in two reflections. The awful spectacle of those drunken men in the morning haunted him like a nightmare. They had risen half drunk from their hot, hard bed, and stupidly had passed him near the gangway with a maudlin: "Fi' morn'n, Fazzer!" And he was studying all day the mighty problem, that has occupied more attention than half the more serious problems of the world. What is it? What is it?-the fatal bias towards intoxication that seems to distinguish the race? Indolence, vacuity of thought, the fatal altruism of the race? What is it? Or is it only a political calumny?

And side by side, alternating rapidly with the bitter reflection, came the question: Why will not Irish mothers educate their children at home? Have we not convents, etc.? Why, it is Irish nuns who are teaching here in Plymouth and throughout England. What is in the English air that the same teachers can teach better here than at home? Or is it the everlasting serfdom of the race, always crouching at the feet of the conqueror, always lessening and depreciating its own large possibilities? Let it alone, Luke, let it alone! Except, indeed, as an exercise, to while away a long afternoon under sleepy awnings, and to soothe your nerves with the dull mechanic interplay of questions that are forever seeking and never finding an answer, let it alone, let it alone! But Luke was not made thus. He had a great taste for the insoluble.

Late in the evening he heard the same officer chatting freely in French, and with the absolute ease of a native, with a young governess who was returning to her home from Ireland. He listened, not with curiosity, but just to see if he could distinguish one word. Not a word! And he had got a prize in French in his logic year. "Hang Wegscheider and the Monophysites," thought Luke.

Now, I should like to know where is the connection between Wegscheider, a fairly modern German, and people that lived fifteen centuries ago? But that is the way the lobes of the brain work and interchange ideas, not always sympathetic, or even relevant, especially when the schoolmaster is in a passion, and demands too much work at once from his willing pupils.

Next day the vessel had swung into the gangway of the

world that mighty sea-avenue that stretches from the Downs and the Forelands right up to London Bridge. The vessel's engines were slowed down, for this was a pathway where the passengers had to pick their steps; for all along the banks at intervals, where the plastic hand of man had built wharves and quays, there was a plantation of bare masts and yards that cut the sky; and now and again a stately steamer loomed up out of the eternal haze, and grew and swelled into colossal blackness; then passed and subsided into the dimensions of a waterfowl that troubles the tranquil waters with swift alarm. Bound for the Orient, and laden with freights of merchandise-from the mechanism of a locomotive to the Brummagem-made idol for far Cathay; bound for the Occident, and laden to the water's edge, and stuffed chock-full with rolls and bales from the looms of Manchester; bound for the roaring Cape and the sleepy isles of the Pacific; bound for the West Indies and the Bermudas, whence Nature has tried in vain to frighten them with her explosive earthquakes or the dread artillery of her typhoons; or homeward from far climates, and with the rusty marks of the storm on their hulls, and their sailors staring at the old familiar sights on land and water-like fairy shuttles, moving to and fro across the woof of many waters,-the fleets of the empire came and went, and Luke fancied he saw the far round world as in a magic mirror, and that he smelt the spices of Sultans and the musk of the gardens of Persia, as the stately argosies swept by. It was a magnificent panorama, and recalled the times when the Mare Magnum was swept by the oars of the Roman triremes, and dusky Ethiopians sweated at the galleys of their Roman masters. Then the vision faded, and in the raw cold of an exceptionally sharp morning, Luke stepped across the gangway and looked down at the mighty sewer of a river, and came face to face with all the squalor and fetor of London life.

He was calmly but courteously received at the presbytery attached to the cathedral; and it surprised him not a little to perceive that his arrival was regarded as an event of as ordinary importance as the closing of a door or the ticking of a clock. He took his seat at the dinnertable; and he might have been dining there for the last twenty years, so little notice was taken of him.