"Well, widout even so much as sayin' 'by your l'ave,' they packed me off to the Classical School in Skibbereen, to learn Latin an' the other dead-an'-gone languages. To make a long story short, it didn't agree wid me, an' I didn't agree wid it. It wasn't the languages. I cud get thim all right. It was this business of bein' a priest. Moind ye, I'm not sayin' annything ag'in the Church. I was born a Catholic, an' I'll die a Catholic. But bein' a priest wint ag'in me grain. To repeat ould dead prayers for dead people, in dead languages, which nobody prisint but the blissed Lord Himself cud onderstand, an He tired of hearin' thim centuries before you were born; to hear ould wives confessin' their sins which they shudn't tell to anny man, barrin' another ould wife loike thimselves; to live on the fat of the land while the Paddies an' Dinnies an' Mickies were livin' on pitaties an' salt, wid now an' ag'in a taste of butthermilk--it didn't seem to me givin' value for the money received.
"An' thin I was gettin' to be a bit of a gossoon, an' sometoimes I was afther thinkin' of me farm at Sleeahtballymackcurraghalicky, which wasn't moine ayther, for it was willed to the Church. They often tould me that whin I was a priest I wud have no use for the farm. They said that a half-acre of purgatory was worth more to a priest than the best two-hundred-acre farm in County Cork. But they all had their well-cultivated garden plots in purgatory, an' bedad but they wanted me farm as well--d'ye moind. They were afther me farm in County Cork as well.
"Not to be wearyin' you wid the details of me autybiography, the longer I was at it the less I loiked it, an' the more I had differences of opinion wid the priests of the college, 'speshully wid the wan they called the Prefect of Discipline, which is the polite name for the Wallopin' Masther. Jist as I was gettin' tired of the b'atin's, an' was thinkin' of runnin' away an' joinin' the navy for the sake of a quiet loife, the English Government came to the assistance of Providence, an' betune the two they got me out of bein' a priest--thanks to the government an' the Hivenly Lord, I got out of bein' a priest."
"How in the world did the government come to interfere with your course in the college?" inquired Sinclair.