"Good heavens! my son," he cried at last, "what had all these men done to you that you tried to send them all into eternity?
Who were they ?" "Oh, Father, they were all bailiffs or tax-collectors!" "You idiot!" exclaimed the confessor, angrily rubbing at his sleeve, "why didn't ye tell me that before instead of letting me spoil my best cassock ?" As I happened to have the book of M.de Mandat Grancey in my despatch-box, I compared it with the attack made upon it.

The results were edifying.

In the first place, M.de Mandat Grancey does not indicate the Canadian priest as his authority.

He says that he heard the story, apparently at a dinner-table in France, from a _cure Irlandais_, who was endeavouring to impress upon his hearers "the sympathy of the clergy with the Land League." The "Canadian priest" now comes forward and makes it a count in his indictment against M.de Mandat Grancey that he is described as an "Irish curate," when he is in fact neither an Irishman nor a curate.

What was more natural than that an ecclesiastic, claiming to live in Ireland, and telling stories in France about the sympathy of the Irish clergy with the Land League, should be taken by one of his auditors to be an Irish _cure_, particularly as the French _cure_ is, I believe, the equivalent of the Irish "parish priest"?
In the next place, the "Canadian priest" declares that the story "is as old as the Round Towers of Ireland," and that M.de Mandat Grancey represents him as making himself the hero of the tale.