Free The Collar by Frank O'Connor Page B

chuckles.
    â€˜Nonsense, man!’ the Bishop said sternly, holding on to a bush and looking down at him from the top of the wall. ‘Why can’t you?’
    â€˜The fairies have me,’ roared Father Fogarty.
    â€˜Pull yourself together, father,’ the Bishop said sternly. ‘You don’t want to be making an exhibition of yourself.’
    Next moment Father Fogarty was lying flat at the foot of the wall, roaring with laughter. Father Devine shouted to the Bishop, but he slid obstinately down at the other side of the wall. ‘The ould divil!’ Paddy exclaimed admiringly. ‘That’s more than we’ll be able to do at his age, father.’
    A few minutes later they found him flat under a tree in the starlight, quite powerless, but full of wisdom, resignation, and peace. They lifted him on a bench, where he reclined like the effigy on a tomb, his hands crossed meekly on his breast, and carried him back to bed.
    â€˜Since that evening,’ Father Devine used to say in the waspish way the Bishop so much disliked, ‘I feel there’s nothing I don’t know about fairies. I also have some idea about the sort of man who wrote the life of St Mulpeter of Moyle.’

T HE M IRACLE
    V ANITY, ACCORDING TO THE BISHOP , was the Canon’s great weakness, and there might be some truth in that. He was a tall, good-looking man, with a big chin, and a manner of deceptive humility. He deplored the fact that so many of the young priests came of poor homes where good manners weren’t taught, and looked back regretfully to the old days when, according to him, every Irish priest read his Virgil. He went in a lot for being an authority on food and wine, and ground and brewed his own coffee. He refused to live in the ramshackle old presbytery which had served generations of priests, and had built for himself a residence that was second only to the Bishop’s palace and that was furnished with considerably more taste and expense. His first innovation in the parish had been to alter the dues which, all over the Christian world, are paid at Christmas and Easter and have them paid four times a year instead. He said that this was because poor people couldn’t afford large sums twice a year, and that-it was easier for them to pay their dues like that; but in fact it was because he thought the dues that had been fixed were far too low to correspond in any way with the dignity of his office. When he was building his house he had them collected five times during the year, and as well as that, threw in a few raffles and public subscriptions. He disliked getting into debt. And there he ate his delicate meals with the right wines, brewed coffee and drank green chartreuse, and occasionally dipped into ecclesiastical history. He like to read about days when the clergy were really well off.
    It was distasteful to the Canon the way the lower classes were creeping into the Church and gaining high office in it, but it was a real heartbreak that its functions and privileges were being usurped by new men and methods, and that miracles were now being performed out of bottles and syringes. He thought that a very undignified way of performing miracles himself, and it was a real bewilderment of spirit to him when some new drug was invented to make the medicine men more indispensable than they were at present. He would have liked surgeons to remain tradesmen and barbers as they were in the good old days, and, though he would have been astonished to hear it himself, was as jealous as a prima donna at the interference of Bobby Healy, the doctor, with his flock. He would have liked to be able to do it all himself, and sometimes thought regretfully that it was a peculiar dispensation of Providence that when the Church was most menaced, it couldn’t draw upon some of its old grace and perform occasional miracles. The Canon knew he would have performed a miracle with a real air. He had the figure for