He proceeded to harrow the feelings of his audience by describing what he had heard at the railway-station one evening while waiting for the train.

As he paced the platform his attention was attracted by the sound of a piano in the station-master's house.

He listened, and, to his amazement and disgust, heard the tune of a popular song, 'a song'-- he brought down his fist on the table as he uttered the awful indictment--'imported from England.' 'I ask,' he went on--'I ask our venerated and beloved parish priest; I ask you, fathers of innocent families; I ask every right-thinking patriot in this room, are our ears to be insulted, our morals corrupted, our intellects depraved, by sounds like these ?' He closed his speech by proposing a resolution requiring the railway company to withdraw the obnoxious official from their midst.
The oratory of the grazier, who seconded the resolution, was not inferior.

It filled his heart with a sense of shame, so he said, to think of his cattle, poor, innocent beasts of the field, being handled by a Protestant.

They had been bred, these bullocks of his, by Catholics, fed by Catholics, were owned by a Catholic, bought with Catholic money at the fairs, and yet they were told that in all Ireland no Catholic could be discovered fit to put them into a train.
Neither the resolution itself nor the heart-rending appeal of the grazier produced the slightest effect on the railway company.