distance, the hour, or the danger, though the sick or dying person was a hundred miles away, though it was midnight, and there was not a star visible in the heavens—though the place to be visited reeked with the deadliest pestilence, the priest should at once obey the solemn summons. The priest who shrinks from this imperative duty is unfit for his mission; happily, an instance of neglect or cowardice is rarely heard of in the Catholic Church. But there are circumstances in which the conscientious discharge of this duty is attended with an amount of individual hardship that can scarcely be appreciated by those who inhabit a country at once thoroughly cultivated and thickly populated.
Father Geary, a Halifax priest—originally from Waterford, and now about four years dead—frequently attended 'sick calls' at a distance of a hundred miles from the city, along the eastern coast of Nova Scotia, and did so without the assistance of horse or vehicle of any kind. He had literally to walk the hundred miles, and this he has done as often as four times in the year. As the tidings of distress reached the city, generally by boat, the zealous missionary at once girded his loins and prepared to set out on his long and arduous journey, frequently in the depth of a Nova Scotian winter, when the snow lay two feet thick on the ground, the thermometer was many degrees below zero, and a cutting blast blew right in his teeth. There was not in his mind a thought of shrinking, a second's doubt as to the necessity of then setting out: a human soul was in peril, and the priest's duty was to reach the sick person's bedside as speedily as possible; and this he did. Twenty miles before breakfast was a trifle to Father Geary.
Within the last ten years a Nova Scotian priest has discharged the duties of a district extending considerably over one hundred miles in length; and while I was in Halifax the Archbishop appointed a clergyman to the charge of a mission which would necessitate his making journeys of more than
