Their kindness to strangers was unbounded.

In the wilds of Mayo Froude caught the smallpox, and was nursed with a devotion which he always remembered, ungrateful as in some of his writings about Ireland he may seem.

After his recovery he wandered about the coast, saw the station of Protestant missionaries at Achill, and was rowed out to Clare Island, where a disabled galleon from the Armada had been wrecked.

His studies in hagiology led him to consider the whole question of the miraculous, and he found it impossible to work with Newman any more.

A religion which rested upon such stories as Father Colgan's was a religion nurtured in lies.
All this, however, had nothing to do with the Church of England by law established, and Froude was ordained deacon in 1845.