Protestants in the family; a secret source of pride

The strange likeness between Archie and Joe-Pat ...

Long ago, years back when Joe-Pat was a boy, he would occasionally come across the Oakley family. The father owned a saw mill and they were relatively well to do. However, they kept themselves to themselves as they were of the Protestant persuasion, upright and God-fearing and never cursed or got drunk and everyone looked up to them. One day Barney told Joe-Pat : "Aren't ye the spit o' thon there young un. Ye'd tek the two of yez for brothers, I'm thinkin'." The boy, called Archie, would stare across at Joe-Pat, for the same idea had obviously occurred to him too. And so it happened that whenever Joe-Pat would be in town, he'd seek out Archie, and Archie likewise. But neither spoke. It was just unthinkable. One day Joe-Pat casually mentioned the Oakleys to his mother and that was when he learned that Oakley wasn't their real name, but an assumed one, and that Archie's great-grandfather had been driven in desperation to "take the soup". And stranger still, wasn't Samuel Oakley, Archie's Da, a second cousin of Joe-Pat's poor father. Far from evoking in the breast of Joe-Pat the usual righteous indignation felt amongst his co-religionists, this revelation of his mother's seemed a consecration of sorts. To be connected with such fine people was a secret source of pride by Joe-Pat's reckoning. "Now don't be goin' tellin' anyone what I told ye, d'ye hear " warned his mother.