“I beg your pardon, sir,” said he, “and I am sorry, now that I know who you are, for the trouble you got into.”

“Thank you, my friend,” said the priest; “I felt it wouldn’t signify, knowing in my conscience that I was no robber.  In the meantime, I got one glimpse of your metropolitan life, as they call it, and the Lord knows I never wish to get another.  Troth, I was once or twice so confounded with the noise and racket, that I thought I had got into purgatory by mistake.”

“Tut, sir, that’s nothing,” replied Skipton; “we were very calm and peaceable this morning; but with respect to that baronet, he’s a niggardly fellow.  Only think of him, never once offering us the slightest compensation for bringing him home his property!  There’s not another man in Ireland would send us off empty-handed as he did.  The thing’s always usual on recovering property.”

“Speak for yourself, in the singular number, if you plaise; you don’t imagine that I wanted compensation.”

“No, sir, certainly not; but I’m just thinking,” he added, after curiously examining Father M’Mahon’s face for some time, “that you and I met before somewhere.”

“Is that the memory you have?” said the priest, “when you ought to recollect that we met this morning, much against my will, I must say.”

“I don’t mean that,” said the man; “but I think I saw you once in a lunatic asylum.”

“Me, in a lunatic asylum?” exclaimed the good priest, somewhat indignantly.  “The thing’s a bounce, my good man, before you go farther.  The little sense I’ve had has been sufficient, thank goodness, to keep me free from such establishments.”

“I don’t mean that, sir,” replied the other, smiling, “but if I don’t mistake, you once brought a clergyman of our persuasion to the lunatic asylum in ------.”

“Ay, indeed,” returned the priest; “poor Quin.  His was a case of monomania; he imagined himself a gridiron, on which all heretics were to be roasted.  That young man was one of the finest scholars in the three kingdoms.  But how do you remember that?”

“Why for good reasons; because I was a servant in the establishment at the time.  Well,” he added, pausing, “it is curious enough that I should have seen this very morning three persons I saw in that asylum.”

“If I had been much longer in that watch-house,” replied the other, “I’m not quite certain but I’d soon be qualified to pay a permanent visit to some of them.  Who were the three persons you saw there, in the mane time?”

“That messenger of yours was one of them, and that niggardly baronet was the other; yourself, as I said, making the third.”

The priest looked at him seriously; “you mane Corbet,” said he, “or Dunphy as he is called?”

“I do.  He and the baron brought a slip of a boy there; and, upon my conscience, I think there was bad work between them.  At all events, poor Mr. Quin and he were inseparable.  The lad promised that he would allow himself to be roasted, the very first man, upon the reverend gridiron;—­and! for that reason Quin took him into hand; and gave him an excellent education.”