Gad, you’ve your flock in the grandest control:
Checking the crazy ones, coaxing unaisy ones,
Lifting the lazy ones on with the stick.
Here’s a health for you, Father O’Flynn,
Slanté and slanté and slanté agin,
Pow’rfulest preacher and tindirest teacher
And kindliest creature in ould Donegal.”
As the last sounds of the chorus died away, a young Irish girl, attired in typical colleen fashion, and a boy of about nineteen or twenty, in knee-breeches, entered. The colleen was a perfect impersonation. The young man, who carried a gun and an empty game-bag, had returned from the chase. He was telling Molly how many birds he had seen and how many he might have shot had it not been for—etc., etc. The more voluble Shaun became, the more Molly shrugged her shoulders. It seemed Shaun had often hunted before, and had often come “very near hitting a bird.”
Just as good-natured Shaun was becoming more eloquent and Molly more disdainful, a stately old figure in cassock and cincture walked slowly into the room, carrying his breviary and biretta. There was a look of benign interest on his face as he regarded Shaun and Molly. The two greeted the priest warmly, in true Irish fashion; yet the three actors were non-Catholics.
I am certain I did not follow the plot of the play. I was too delighted with Father O’Flynn. He was the ideal priest, genial, kind, grave. He possessed all those lovable qualities that we Catholics always associate with the priesthood. I was really delighted with the impersonation of the character. Where had he, the actor, acquired his wonderful knowledge of the priesthood? If it had been a play that the lads had procured already written, I would not have been so surprised; but they themselves had composed it.