The Wayward Saint
by Paul Vincent Carroll

THE STORY: As told by Walter Kerr, ”Canon Daniel McCooey, a potato-faced old fellow with a sheep's head of hair, has been working far too many 'miracles' for his Bishop's peace of mind.

He's been talking to birds and animals, for one thing ('If only I'd studied some one besides St. Francis,' mourns the unlucky parish priest), and he's somehow or other managed to get a cherry tree to produce plums.

Though he isn't at all proud of himself and regards the gossip that he is a saint as a scandal, he still must be hustled out of sight.

The pained Bishop…deposits him in a remote country rectory that's a 'sweet little hole, but terrible out of the way,' deprives him of his beloved animals, and puts him to work knitting ecclesiastical socks…A mysterious baron with a faint odor of sulphur about him, turns up, a friendly lion strolls in at the garden window, the padre learns a few new tricks from the baron and begins to preen himself on his supernatural powers, and-well, at eleven o'clock he's perched in a chair ten feet off the floor bemoaning the loss of him immortal representative, and when the Canon, whose pride the Devil has utilized, again doubts that he is a saint he really becomes one.”