Who worshipped God a different way,
Requesting earnestly that they,
Alone, would be allowed to lay
The body in its mother clay.
There was at that time somewhat of a distant feeling between the Catholics and the Protestants of the town. Some few years before that, the Ecclesiastical Titles bill was passed in Parliament, that made it an offense for a Catholic bishop to sign his name to any paper or pastoral as “bishop of his diocese.” Some of the Protestants of the town had privately sent a petition to Parliament praying for the passage of the bill. Some member of Parliament got the names of those who signed that petition, and sent them to Skibbereen. The Skibbereen men had them printed and placarded on the walls, and from that sprang the cold feeling I allude to. The Protestants, at Doctor Jerrie’s funeral, stood at the graveyard gate of the Abbey field, and asked us who were bearing the coffin, to do them the favor of letting them bear it from the gate to the grave. We granted them the favor, and there were the ten Catholic priests reading the Catholic prayers, and the eight Protestants, bearing the coffin through the graveyard.
John Tierney, of Kings County, is reading those “Recollections” of mine, and he sends me a communication which I will make a place for here, as the subject he alludes to had place about the time I am now speaking of—the year 1857. This is his note.
No. 635 West 42d Street, New York.
Dear Sir—I like best the books I brought with me from dear old Ireland; though, like myself, they are sadly the worse for the wear.
I send you Charles J. Kickham’s story of “Sally Cavanagh.” He speaks of you in the preface. Well—well—the figure of the world, for us two anyway, “passeth away.” Still, “while every hope was false to me,” and also thee, there is pride and comfort in such testimony from such a whole-souled Irishman as Kickham, who knew not how to favor or flatter, any more than your old friend,
John Tierney.