PHIL MAGUIRE IN THE FAR WEST.

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embarked in search of other, and more prosperous fortunes. In due time, the ship in which he had taken passage, freighted with her living cargo of eager, hoping emigrants, reached the land of promise, and scarcely had a twelvemonth passed away, when from the farthest West news came to home, that Philip and his wife were living in prosperity and content in the land to which they had fled for refuge. It was not long, too, before money for the ould and the little folks at home came from the frinds who were willing that their exile should be shared by those they had left behind them. So Phil Maguire has those he loved in the Old counthry near to him in the New; whilst still on the wild moor the little hovel raises its decaying thatch above the road side, and still near the one wind-tossed tree the lean cow seeks a shelter from the rain and blast, which are (excepting themselves) the worst enemies of this thriftless and unmendable people.

CHAPTER III.

PROTESTANT ANATHEMAS-HIGHLANDERS' OPINIONS

TOM MALLEY'S LUGS.

THE following day (it was an early one in August) I arrived at the end of my journey, and took up my quarters with an old friend and not very distant relation, who occupied, for the time being, a small fishing-lodge, beautifully situated at the foot of a mountain which rose almost precipitously from the shores of a trout-filled loch.

Since last I had seen him, Edward Fairholme had married, and his wife, the "Bertha" of these pages, was as pleasant and as cheery a companion as a man could wish for in a mountain solitude. She was a good sailor, too, and fond of the sea, a great desideratum on the present occasion, as Fairholme and I were joint proprietors of a small yacht yclept the "Humming Bird," the which vessel was a pretty cutter of thirty-five tons burthen, the crew of which consisted of but two men and a boy, the "master"

THE MISSION CHURCH.

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being an Englishman, and the rest natives of the country we were sojourning in.

It was Sunday in that wild Western Land, and we had, about a week after my arrival, landed in our dingy on the low rocks which fringe this portion of the coast. We had been cruizing for two days amongst the islands in the bay, and had enjoyed our sail wondrously, for our little vessel had behaved admirably during rather rough and squally weather -weather which caused us greatly to enjoy the change to light winds and fitful gleams of sunshine.

The "Humming Bird" now lay in a sheltered cove amongst the rocks, whilst we, obeying the summons of a single tinkling bell which called us to the House of Prayer (or building raised from the funds of the Church Mission Society), soon found ourselves standing, prayer-books in hand, beside the porch, and waiting for the coming of the minister. The church was of very small dimensions, and of the plainest, or, to speak more correctly, of the ugliest order of architecture. It stood alone at the extremity of a barren moor, there being no ostensible village, and the only houses that had any pretension to be called such, were hidden from our view by a rising ground, round which a humble imi

tation of a wood had doubtless long been struggling against the severity of the western gales.

From those more imposing tenements (there were but two which differed from the dwellings mentioned in the old surveys as having "only one smoak"), a society emerged whose outward adornment was in striking contrast to that of their (still) Romanist frinds around.

As a rule, the converts are greatly addicted to fine clothes; and there was no exception to this amongst the domestic servants, school-teachers, male and female, and the dapper Scripture-readers, who formed almost the entire congregation assembled in that Protestant place of worship.

A few (I think they numbered six) children represented the school, and there were eight souls, including our three selves, who had never bowed the knee to Baal, which, being interpreted, means that they had been "Protestants evermore." The rest of the congregation was composed, as I before mentioned, of the converting staff, and of the family of the officiating clergyman, whilst two or three rather unpromising looking proselytes took their seats on a distant bench, with an air unmistakeably ashamed and sheepish, and looking as though they had not yet become inured to the always loudly-expressed

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contempt of their mass-going friends and relations who had not as yet been lured by bribes and promises over the Protestant pale.

The minister, who was a very young, and a necessarily inexperienced man, with the loudest of voices and the broadest of brogues, rated severely the "brands he had plucked from the burning," unjustly, too, I thought; since they committed a

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mortal sin," according to their former creed, in entering a Protestant place of worship, and they should, in all justice, have been encouraged accordingly. It seemed also a little hard upon them to dwell so heavily on the awful fact that all their friends and relations who had lived and died as Romanists" were (and that even in cases where their errors had never been pointed out to them) expiating their fatal mistakes in the hottest fire of the hottest place for ever!

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Heavens! how energetically did that Christian minister shower curses on those erring souls and bodies! What shocking names he gave them, and what awful anathemas did he invoke upon the heads of those misguided beings who dared to lift their eyes to the "vile and odious emblem of the Cross!"

The sermon lasted more than an hour, during the greater part of which period I confess to a feverish