Teddy O'Toole, who gave me so much amusement last summer while I was sojourning in a mountain town, has been at it again, I hear.
He is a sad case.
What do you think, his last trick was but to play good old Father Ryan for a dinner.
Let me tell you the ingenious way the graceless scamp went about it.
First of all, being hard set by hunger, what does he do but steal a fat young fowl from the priest's henyard.
Having wrung its neck he presented himself before the reverend father, looking sadly repentant.
"What now, Teddy?" asked the old man, who was growing weary of wrestling with the devil as personified in the vagrant.
O'Toole, with his head hanging low, confessed that in an evil moment he had stolen a fowl, and then, stung by the lashing of his conscience, had come to confess his wrong.
The father, of course, began to lecture him.