century-and was spoken by many of them on special occasions. And it is authoritatively boasted that cows were bought and sold in Greek, in mountain market-places of Kerry.10

Throughout these dreadful centuries, too, the hunted priestwho in his youth had been smuggled to the Continent of Europe to receive his training-tended the flame of faith. He lurked like a thief among the hills. On Sundays and feast days he celebrated Mass at a rock, on a remote mountainside, while the congregation knelt on the heather of the hillside, under the open heavens. While he said Mass, faithful sentries watched from all the nearby hilltops, to give timely warning of the approaching priest-hunter and his guard of British soldiers. But sometimes the troops came on them unawares, and the Mass Rock was bespattered with his blood, and men, women and children caught in the crime of wor

16 Dr. Douglas Hyde tells of the famous Munster poet, Owen Roe O'Sullivan, how, while still a common farm-hand, he amazed his master's son (just returned from a Continental college) by construing for the latter a Greek passage that had puzzled him. O'Sullivan was taken from behind the spade then. And after a little while he opened, near Charleville, a school where he taught Latin and Greek.

The present writer had a friend, an old mountaineer in Donegal, who told him how, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, his father, then a youth, used to hear at "the Priest's Dinner" in the mountain station house, the priest, the schoolmaster, and inany of the well-to-do mountaineers discourse in Latin.

To these hedge schoolmasters who at the cost of their happiness and risk of their lives fed the little flame of knowledge among the hills and glens of Ireland, throughout Ireland's dread night, Ireland can never repay her debt.

THE HEDGE SCHOOLMASTERS

When the night shall lift from Erin's hills, 'twere shame if we forget
One band of unsung heroes whom Freedom owes a debt.

When we brim high cups to brave ones then, their memory let us pledge
Who gathered their ragged classes behind a friendly hedge.

By stealth they met their pupils in the glen's deep-hidden nook,
And taught them many a lesson was never in English book;
There was more than wordy logic shown to use in wise debate;
Nor amo was the only verb they gave to conjugate.

When hunted on the heathery hill and through the shadowy wood,

They climbed the cliff, they dared the marsh, they stemmed the tumbling flood; Their blanket was the clammy mist, their bed the wind-swept bent;

In fitful sleep they dreamt the bay of blood-hounds on their scent.

Their lore was not the brightest, nor their store, mayhap, the best,
But they fostered love, undying, in each young Irish breast;

And through the dread, dread night, and long, that steeped our island then,
The lamps of hope and fires of faith were fed by these brave men.

The grass waves green above them; soft sleep is theirs for aye;

The hunt is over, and the cold; the hunger passed away.

O hold them high and holy! and their memory proudly pledge,

Who gathered their ragged classes behind a friendly hedge.-SEUMAS MACMANUS

shipping God among the rocks, were frequently slaughtered on the mountainside.17

Then, bishops and archbishops, meanly dressed in rough homespuns, trudged on foot among their people-and often dwelt, ate and slept, in holes in the ground.18

Thus, in their miserable lairs, in the bogs and barren mountains, whither they were trailed by wolf-hounds and blood-hounds, were sheltered all that was noble, high, and holy, in Ireland— while rascal and renegade, silk-and-fine-linen-clad, fattening on the

17 To enable the members of their congregation to baffle the inquisition before which they were liable at any time to be compelled to swear when and where they last attended Mass and who was the priest that officiated, an improvised curtain was oftentimes hung between the celebrant and the worshippers-so that they could truthfully swear they did not see the celebrant. With the same object in view, at the ordination of priests not the bishop alone laid on hands, but several others together with him.

18 Edmund Spenser, in his day observing all this, "did marvel" how these hunted priests, foregoing all the comforts and pleasures of life, and inviting both life and death's fearfulest terrors, pursued their mission "without hope of reward and richesse."

"Reward and richesse!" exclaims the non-Catholic Mitchel, commenting on this. "I know the spots within my own part of Ireland where venerable archbishops hid themselves, as it were, in a hole of the rock. . . . Yet it was with full knowledge of all this, with full resolution to brave all this, that many hundreds of educated Irishmen, fresh from the colleges of Belgium or of Spain, pushed to the Sea Coast at Brest or St. Malo, to find some way of crossing to the land that offered them a life of work and of woe. Imagine a priest ordained at Seville or Salamanca, a gentleman of high old name, a man of eloquence and genius, who has sustained disputations in the college halls on questions of literature or theology, and carried off prizes and crowns--see him on the quays of Brest, bargaining with some skipper to work his passage. He throws himself on board, does his full part of the hardest work, neither feeling the cold spray nor the fiercest tempest. And he knows, too, that the end of it all, for him, may be a row of sugar canes to hoe under the blazing sun of Barbados. Yet he pushes eagerly to meet his fate; for he carries in his hands a sacred deposit, bears in his heart a holy message, and must tell it or die. See him, at last, springing ashore, and hurrying on to seek his bishop in some cave, or under some hedge-but going with caution by reason of the priest catcher and the blood-hounds."

In the middle of the seventeenth century the Primate of Ireland lived in a little farmhouse under the name of "Mr. Ennis." The bishop of Kilmore, who was a good musician, travelled his diocese as a Highland bagpiper. And other ecclesiastics assumed what disguise suited their bent. The Archbishop of Tuam used to address his letters from his (undisclosed) “place of refuge in Connemara."

The learned and saintly Bishop Gallagher (still famed for his sermons), a noble and beautiful character, had many escapes in his unending peregrinations, travelling stick in hand, and homespun clad, among his flock-sleeping sometimes in human habitation, sometimes in a hole in the bank and frequently among the beasts of the field. Once when he had the good fortune to be sheltered under a poor roof in Donegal, he was aroused in the middle of the night by the alarm that the priest-hunters were close upon him. Half-clad, he escaped-but the poor man who had been guilty of housing him was taken out and cruelly done to death. After this Bishop was translated to the midlands, the Palace of this learned and truly noble man was a bothy built against a bank in the Bog of Allen!

fat of an anguished land, languished in the country's high seats of honour! 19

From time to time, to satisfy itself that the Penal Laws were being enforced, the Government called for returns on the subject, which returns, still preserved with the other State records, throw interesting side-light upon the Penal activities. The returns, for instance, of 1714, made by the High Sheriffs of counties and Mayors of cities, show the number of priests and schoolmasters then held in various jails, and in apology for the numbers not being more impressive, explain that the fugitive priest and schoolmaster are "difficult to take." A High Sheriff of Longford reports holding in jail: "Patrick Ferrall and John Lennan, convicted of being popish schoolmasters, and sentenced to transportation." The High Sheriff of Dublin holds "two popish schoolmasters under sentence of transportation." The Mayors of Galway and Kilkenny have priests awaiting transportation. The High Sheriff of Wicklow reports the dispersal of "a riotous assembly" at St. Kevin's in Glendalough-meaning the ancient pilgrimage in honour of St. Kevin. "We rode all right," he says, "and reached the scene at 4 A. M. on June 3rd. The rioters immediately dis

19 It is good to record that many and many a time during the centuries of Ireland's agony, decent God-fearing, truly Christian Protestants hid the hunted priest when the bloodhounds, and human hounds, were close upon him, saving the hunted one's life at the risk of his own.

And many a time, too, the decent Protestant-sometimes a poor man-accepted legal transfer of the lands of his Catholic neighbour and held them for his Catholic neighbour's benefit-thus saving them from being forfeited to a "Discoverer."

There was a poor Protestant blacksmith in Tipperary in Penal times, who, to save their property to his Catholic neighbours, was in legal possession of thousands of acres of land. Yet the brave fellow, with all those broad acres at his mercy, lived and died in proud poverty.

The late date down to which these persecutions were carried may be judged from the fact that the present Irish Primate's predecessor, Archbishop McGettigan, used to tell how, as a lad, at the Mass Rock in the mountain, he acted as sentry, as acolyte, and as candle-stick (one of the two boys who at either side of the altarrock held the lighted candle and shielded it from the wind).

On the occasion of a recent lecture tour in California, I met, in a valley of the Sierras, a middle-aged Donegal man, who told me how, when he was a little boy in Donegal, a man with a much disfigured face came one day to his father's house, of whom his father told him how he had escaped with only this disfigurement from a Mass Rock massacre-when the priest-hunters and soldiers had, unawares, surprised the congregation in their crime.

Even in recent days, in some of the remote parts of Ireland, often the local representatives of the governing power, the landlord and magistrate, would not permit the erection of a Catholic Church within the district of which he was over-lord. The Church of the famous Father McFadden of Gweedore, had to be erected on a No-man's land, the dead-line between the possessions of two English landlords-a gulch which had been the bed of a mountain torrent-now diverted. On a fatal stormy Sunday in the eighties the torrent, finding its old way again, swept down upon the little chapel, packed with its mountain congregation, and left sad hearts and lone hearths in bleak Gweedore.

persed: and we pulled down their tents, threw down and demolished their superstitious crosses, destroyed their wells, and apprehended and committed one Toole, a popish schoolmaster."

In 1731 the bishops of the Established Church made interesting returns for the "Report of the State of Popery in Ireland." Sample returns for parishes in the diocese of Clogher will give an idea of the whole. In one parish, "The papists have one altar made of earth and stone, uncovered." In another parish, "Mass is celebrated in ye open fields at two distant places." In a third, "No Mass house, but two or three altars." And in still another parish, "No Mass house but ye people meet in ye fields-Owen O'Gallagher, an old Fryer, instructs a great many popish students." In another, "Edward McGrath and one Connelly officiate in several parts of ye parish, in woods near ye mountains." Henry, Bishop of Derry, reports: "We are frequently infested with strolling Fryars and Regulars who say Mass from Parish to Parish as they pass, in ye open fields or ye mountains, and gather great numbers of people about them. Sometimes a straggling schoolmaster sets up in some of ye mountains, but upon being threatened, as they constantly are, with a warrant or a presentment by ye church-wardens, they generally think it proper to withdraw."

And the Bishop of Down and Connor reports: "Dr. Arm

In this writer's own parish of Inver, a relic of the Penal Days was with us till he had reached mature manhood. It was a scalan-a three-walled thatched Mass-shed which sheltered the altar and the officiating priest. In front of the open end, every Sunday morning, the congregation, gathered hither from miles of moor and mountain, knelt on the bare hillside under the open heavens-often with miry slush soaking their knees, and pelting rain or driving hail mercilessly lashing their bodies, and whipping their upturned faces. Whether blowing or snowing, shining or showering, every Sabbath saw there the crowd of devotees from remote homes-man and woman, boy and girl, barefoot child and crawling old.

In the days when this writer, a light-footed bouchaillin, scudded the moors to Mass, there mothered England and step-mothered Ireland, a respectable, homelyminded lady, who had developed a comfortable embonpoint, and fattened a very large brood of children, at the expense of poor, lean, famished, famine-haunted Ireland a worthy enough old lady who represented the power that robbed us of everything except our hardships, and bestowed on us nothing but our poverty. About the very time that our scalan congregation would be kneeling in the mud on the arctic shoulder of Ardaghey Hill this good old lady and her middling welltrained children would probably be bogging their knees in the yielding plush of their prie-dieux, in the magnificent Chapel of Buckingham Palace or before a comforting fire, languidly sinking out of one another's sight in the caressing upholstery of their Palace drawing-room. And the writer can vividly remember the queer questioning that started in his boyish mind one fierce February Sunday when, with the miserable multitude at Mass on that storm-lashed hillside, their knees sunk in the marrow-freezing mire, their few sorry clothes soaked through and plastered to their bones by snow-broth, bared heads battered, and faces whipped and cut by the driving sleet, he heard the sagart (a simple saintly soul) lead in supplicating the Lord to grant health and happiness to, and shower His manifold blessings upon, “Her Majesty, the Queen of this Realm, and all the Royal Family"!

strong 20 takes upon him to be bishop, and holds visitations at which there appear great numbers-the Itinerant Preachers, I suppose, making part of them. There were several of those that have great concourse about them."

The marvellous spirit that inspired the young Irishmen who gave their lives for the preserving of their people's faith in these times of terror, could not be more strikingly illustrated than by presenting to the reader-from another Parliamentary returnone of the late date of 1782—the following list of some of the many places, far and wide over the Continent of Europe, to which they penetrated in search of education and ordination. These "reg istered" priests (only the smaller portion of the priestly body), all of them ordained between 1760-80, were educated in:

Toledo, Barcelona, Mechlin, Paris, Brussels, Prague, Como, Rome, Viterbo, Treves, Compostella, Cremona, Lisbon, Toul, Bordeaux, Bazas, Sarlate (France), Lombez (France), Antwerp, Liège, Vaison (France), Avignon, Monte Fiascone, Bagnovea, Orvieto, Dol, Spire, Toulouse, Sarni, Arezzo (Tuscany), Nepi (Italy), St. Lizie, St. Papule (France), Pampelona (Spain), Zaragossa, Placence (Italy), Puy, Ypres, Dizd, Seville, Nantes, Rennes, St. Malo, Chalons, Vienna, Ageu (France), Orte, Azola, Elvas (Portugal), Louvain, Milan, Crema (State of Venice), Montpellier, Perpignan,

20 The following few lines from The Will of this Dr. Armstrong (who "takes upon him to be Bishop") who died in 1739, is an interesting commentary on the man, his office, his circumstances, and his time. These are some typical extracts from the whole, as printed in Archivium Hibernicum I (It is to be remembered that while the will had to be made in English-in compliance with form-this man, like almost all the learned Irish of his day, probably knew little or nothing of the English language, while in all likelihood, he could freely converse in French, Italian, Latin, and perhaps Greek)

"I order my horse, and my oats, and my pewter, foure chears, and the furr table, and my six new shirts to be sould in order to defray my funerall expenses and to pay my just and law full details.

"I order John Taylor of Ballyverly thirteen pence.

"I order the Convent of Castlewilliam one moydore and the Convent of Dromenecoil one guinea.

"I order Jon. O'Doherty, my servant, my wearing cloathes, and my mare, and both my sadels and bridels, my little oake table and my Dixonary.

"I order Patt O'Doharty my bed and bed cloathes, my oveal table, my two pots, and my gridle, and a grediron.

"I order Neale Armstrong and Mary Donevan my ould lennin and my three chists and two bed steds. I order Neale the green drogged.

"I order Henry Armstrong my big coat.

"I order the Rev. Mr. Patt Byrne and the Rev. Mr. Edward Jennings my

books.

"I order Meary Doharty fifteen shillings. I order Anne Killin two shillings and eight pence halfpenny.

"I order the Rev. Mr. Jon. Fitzsimons my vestments, and my hat, and the shute of cloaths that Mrs. Russell gave me, and he to say sixty Masses to her intention.

"I order Oliver Taylor one shilling and one penny, if my substance will afford it."