Patrick’s look was, ‘Give me a chance’; and Mr. Adister continued:  ’Good runs are to be had here; you shall try them.  You are something of a shot, I suppose.  We hear of gentlemen now who neither hunt nor shoot.  You fence?’

‘That’s to say, I’ve had lessons in the art.’

‘I am not aware that there is now an art of fencing taught in Ireland.’

‘Nor am I,’ said Patrick; ’though there’s no knowing what goes on in the cabins.’

Mr. Adister appeared to acquiesce.  Observations of sly import went by him like the whispering wind.

‘Your priests should know,’ he said.

To this Patrick thought it well not to reply.  After a pause between them, he referred to the fencing.

‘I was taught by a Parisian master of the art, sir.’

‘You have been to Paris?’

‘I was educated in Paris.’

‘How?  Ah!’ Mr. Adister corrected himself in the higher notes of recollection.  ‘I think I have heard something of a Jesuit seminary.’

’The Fathers did me the service to knock all I know into me, and call it education, by courtesy,’ said Patrick, basking in the unobscured frown of his host.

‘Then you are accustomed to speak French?’ The interrogation was put to extract some balm from the circumstance.

Patrick tried his art of fence with the absurdity by saying:  ’All but like a native.’

‘These Jesuits taught you the use of the foils?’

‘They allowed me the privilege of learning, sir.’

After meditation, Mr. Adister said:  ‘You don’t dance?’ He said it speculating on the’ kind of gentleman produced in Paris by the disciples of Loyola.

‘Pardon me, sir, you hit on another of my accomplishments.’

‘These Jesuits encourage dancing?’

‘The square dance—­short of the embracing:  the valse is under interdict.’

Mr. Adister peered into his brows profoundly for a glimpse of the devilry in that exclusion of the valse.

What object had those people in encouraging the young fellow to be a perfect fencer and dancer, so that he should be of the school of the polite world, and yet subservient to them?

‘Thanks to the Jesuits, then, you are almost a Parisian,’ he remarked; provoking the retort

’Thanks to them, I’ve stored a little, and Paris is to me as pure a place as four whitewashed walls:’  Patrick added:  ’without a shadow of a monk on them.’  Perhaps it was thrown in for the comfort of mundane ears afflicted sorely, and no point of principle pertained to the slur on a monk.

Mr. Adister could have exclaimed, That shadow of the monk! had he been in an exclamatory mood.  He said:  ’They have not made a monk of you, then.’

Patrick was minded to explain how that the Jesuits are a religious order exercising worldly weapons.  The lack of precise words admonished him of the virtue of silence, and he retreated—­with a quiet negative:  ’They have not.’