in the ordinary run of life, he was an unfailing source of strength and courage in more serious emergencies. He had a wonderful talent for lightening the sorrows of the sick room and mitigating the terrors of the deathbed. He was the truest of friends. One of his friends writes: "He was all kindness, sweetness, and gentleness. No one could tell his goodness and how hard it is to do without him; and it is harder as the time goes on." To have seen better days, to be in trouble, to be down in the world-these were additional recommendations in his eyes. A stamped receipt that survived by accident among his papers must represent thousands of cases where he relieved the necessities of genteel poverty. Received from the Rev. Edward Kelly, S.J., the sum of two pounds eight shillings, being the amount of three months' rent for lodging from the 27th November, 1896, to the 27th February, 1897, due by Miss at sixteen shillings a month." What other little memorial notes about Father Kelly may be set down before bringing this sketch to an end? Here is a letter written shortly before his death to the Superior of a convent, to which he had ministered as confessor thirty years before : : ST. FRANCIS XAVIER'S, MY DEAR MOTHER PRIORESS, UPPER GARDINER STREET, Will you have the great kindness to ask the Sisters of your dear Community to pray for a special and important intention in which I am greatly concerned? I am an old servant of your holy convent in days gone by, though I fear I must have almost passed out of their recollection. But I think Mother Raymond and Mother Agnes will still remember I myself look back to the years, not few, of my service-a holy and honourable one-with immense pleasure and consolation. With great respect and with most kind wishes to all the Sisters, Ever, my dear Mother Prioress, me. Most faithfully yours in Christ, Without knowing it, he was addressing in this letter one of the two named in it; who adds that during the eleven years that they enjoyed his spiritual direction," he came and went, like the daylight, silently "-that "he was so reticent that his record lies buried in the hearts of those whom he served." He continued his varied ministries of zeal and charity almost to the very last. At the age of four score he had no need to adopt as his own the opening lines of a beautiful and holy book:* In my upper chamber here Still I wait from year to year, Wondering when the time will come Still God keeps me-He knows why- No such period of waiting and inaction preceded Father Kelly's departure. He worked on for others, even during the few months at the end which gave a gentle warning for the special preparation which was not needed. A few days of weakness and weariness, and then a holy and happy death ended a long life of constant and earnest labour, of ardent, unwearying zeal, of most amiable and solid virtue ripening through the patient years into high sanctity. Father Edward Kelly died on the 7th of February, 1905. On the third day of the preceding December he had completed his 80th year. He died in the beloved home of so many busy and useful and holy, and therefore so many happy years, the presbytery attached to St. Francis Xavier's Church, Upper Gardiner Street, Dublin. He was buried in Glasnevin beside his brother and many of his Brothers of the Society of Jesus under the holy shadow of the noble Celtic cross on which his name is joined with many names. One of the ways by which Father Kelly proved his characteristic fidelity to friends and his reverence for the dead, was his remarkable assiduity in attending Requiem Masses and accompanying the remains of the departed to what is often falsely called their last resting-place. This was not forgotten when his own turn came, and the best authority on such matters has told me that he never saw a priest's funeral more numerously attended. Tacitus, in his introduction to the Life of Agricola, writes thus: "The present work, which is dedicated to the honour *The Hidden Servants, and Other Very Old Stories, told over again by Francesca Alexander. of my father-in-law, may be thought to merit approbation or at least excuse from the piety of the intention." Hic liber, honori soceri mei destinatus, professione pietatis aut laudatus erit aut excusatus. In like manner, filial piety towards my first Superior, my Father in religious life, may serve as some excuse for this attempt to put into print a slight record of Edward Kelly, Priest of the Society of Jesus. M. R. THE LITTLE ONES WOULD you shun them, turn away, Lurks there in their guileless eyes By some angel from high places? One there was, in days of old M. E. FRANCIS. A DWELLER IN "THE HUNDREDS" TOM ANOTHER Ffamine exile. OM Griffin was a quiet man, and he dwelt in the "Hundreds" at Brentford. My personal memories of Tom are fast fading. I seem to recall a tall stooped man of forty, with a dark, oval, priest-like face. But he passed out of my life before I reached my teens; my people dwelt some miles from the historic town of the "Three Kings" and of the battle in the Civil War. Suffice it that I now know him intimately from talk with the "old neighbours," of whom I was privileged to give some account to readers of the April IRISH MONTHLY, in a sketch entitled Yellow Dan." For new readers, I may say, in few words, that they were Famine emigrants, mostly from Munster, who settled towards 1851, in Brentford, Isleworth, and Mortlake -orchard-villages in the Valley of the Thames. Tom was a "quiet" man. Every Corkonian of his day pronounced the word in one syllable-" quite." Tom Griffin went further. He could not manage the sound of "qu," but made a "k" of it, as do the French. Thus Tom, in his vernacular, was a "kite" man. He was also one in reality-a tranquil, easy-going, pious bachelor, who avoided disturbance with his neighbours as the devil dodges holy water. Being such, all Irishmen (and Irishwomen) will at once understand the seeming paradox that Tom had bravely borne arms in the insurrectionary movement of '48, had returned to have his fling on the hill-side with the Fenians in '67, and retained to his dying day a venerable musket, well kept and well oiled, which hung beneath a crucifix over his mantel-piece, flanked by pictures of St. Patrick and of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. He had though the humblest of Mass-going men-the consciousness of this virtue of serenity. "I'm a kite man," he would say, whatever happened of a ruffling nature. "Yes, yes; I'm a kite man." It became a by-word in exiled families along the Valley. In our own little household, when I was in youthful tantrums, I was advised by my father to become "a kite man, ,"* like Tom Griffin of the "Hundreds." A word about these "Hundreds," in which so many of the Famine exiles lived. One hardly knows whether to use the singular or plural in speaking of them-or it. Brentford still has its "Butts "-and a prosperous convent, giving work to many a Catholic laundress, now flourishes in the broad space once given up to archery. The "Hundreds "-a squat quadrangle of solid Georgian cottages-no longer exist. They have been bought up and built over with trim pseudo-villas-redbrick boxes with slated lids. Antiquarians used to worry about the name, I remember. One of the most learned of these, Mr. James Britten, K.S.G., the founder of the Catholic Truth Society, was especially bothered. We read of the "hundred" of this place and that in Domesday Book, but why the name of Hundreds" as applied to a rectangular patch of ground enclosed by houses, in a biggish market town which must have been of some importance even in the days of William the Norman ? However this may be, the "Hundreds were a very cosy, oldworld quarter as I remember them, with a strong contingent of their English and Protestant aborigines dwelling in one half of the square, and a yet larger colony of Irish "neighbours on the other. At the far corner, to the right, and just opposite you as you emerged from the bricked archway leading to the "Hundreds," was the house where Tom Griffin lodged. In the room on the ground floor were the pictures, the crucifix-and the musket, which report declared to contain a gill of powder, and a whole egg-cup full of shot. It was not hard for small boys to gain an awed glimpse of these treasures; for the front door, opening immediately on the "living room," was mostly open during the day when the vanithee was in and out, doing the household *Tom Griffin's mispronunciation of the sound " qu" reminds me of a Charles Reade story, which has never before been printed. Reade could not pronounce the letter s," but substituted for it the sound "gh," as heard in the Irish word, "bough." My friend, Mr. David Christie Murray, was bantering Reade one day on the amount of extracts from blue-books and histories with which he overloaded his extraordinary novels. The retort of the author of Hard Cash has always struck me as one of the ablest defences of the higher plagiarism ever made. “I may milk a thoughand cowgh [a thousand cows] into my pail," he said, "but the butter I churn igh my own!" |