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Updated: June 7, 2025
One woman told me, that she had seen Father Phelan in the street, talking with a man, to whom he said, that the people were coming to tear down the house in which I stayed, intending afterward to set fire to it in the cellar. I was in another room when she came, and heard her talking on and abusing me; then coming out, I said, "How dare you say I do not speak the truth?"
Only later could she expand to the point of including them in her cosmos of people. Nan was transplanted, and her roots had not yet struck down into the soil. In her shopping peregrinations she was making casual acquaintance, and she had not yet become accustomed to it. "I bought some darling little casseroles at Phelan's to-day," she said. "The whole Phelan family waited on me.
That was all there was to it! Let them take the case and decide it! It should not take 'em very long. The question of how the defendant should be punished, if at all, did not concern them. He would take care of that. They might safely leave it to him! He bowed and turned to his papers. The jury gathered up their coats and straggled after Cap Phelan out of the court room.
The priest was walking up his little lawn reading his breviary, and a great fear came on Pat Phelan, and he thought he must ask the priest what he should do. The priest heard the story over the little wall, and he was sorry for the old man. It took him a long time to tell the story, and when he was finished the priest said: "But where are you going, Pat?"
He thought with regret of his well-laid plans: an early arrival, a Turkish bath, the purchase of a new outfit, instalment at a good hotel, then presentation at the fraternity headquarters of Mr. Phelan Harrihan, Gentleman for a Night.
He then stated what he had heard Father Phelan say, and expressed his entire conviction of its truth, and the extreme joy he felt on discovering, as he supposed he had, that his own priest was innocent, and had gained such a triumph over me. A talkative Irish woman also made her appearance, among those who called at the house, and urged for permission to see me.
Phelan, in his "History of Tennessee," deserves especial praise for having so clearly understood the part played by the Scotch-Irish. The Campbell MSS. contain allusions to various such feuds, and accounts of the jealousies existing not only between families, but between prominent members of the same family. See Milfort, Smyth, etc., as well as the native writers.
Phelan loosened his hold on the railing and had only time to scramble breathlessly up the bank before the down train, the train for Nashville which was to have been his, whizzed past. He watched it regretfully as it slowed up at the station, then almost immediately pulled out again for the south, carrying his hopes with it.
The old gentleman, fortunately, was spared all disappointment in regard to his irresponsible protégé, for he died before the catastrophe, leaving Phelan Harrihan a legacy of fifteen dollars a month and the memory of a kind, but misguided, old man who was not quite right in his head.
"Got 'em off a scarecrow, did you?" said the man at his head, when the fun had subsided; "say, I want to be 'round when you tell that to the Superintendent of the Penitentiary I ain't heard him laugh in ten years!" So, in the face of such unbelief, Phelan lapsed into silence and gloom.
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