Miss O’Leary, who was the church organist in the small church in her village, was in her eighties and had never been married.
She was a little old lady who was much admired for her sweetness and kindness to all, nobody had ever had a bad thing to say about her.
One fine Spring afternoon, the parish priest came to call on Miss O’Leary and she welcomed him into the living room of her little cottage.
She invited him to have a seat on her sofa, while she went into the kitchen and put the kettle on to make a pot of tea.
As the parish priest sat facing the old pump organ that Miss O’Leary kept in her living room, he noticed that there was a cut glass bowl sitting on top of it.
Looking closer at the bowl, the priest could see that it was filled with water, but imagine his shock and surprise when he saw that floating in the water was of all things, an item that men often use to help prevent conception.
You can’t even begine to imagine how surprised he was, let alone how curious he was as to why it was there in the first place. Surely Miss O’Leary had lost her senses, he thought.
When she returned with the tea and biscuits, they began to chat.
The priest tried to stifle his curiosity about the bowl of water and its unusual contents, but soon it got the better of him and he just had to ask that question.
Unable to resist any longer, he pointed at the bowl and said, “Miss O’Leary, I wonder if you would tell me about this?”
“Oh, yes, Father”, she replied, “Isn’t it wonderful?”
Miss O’Leary continued, “I was walking in the village last October and I found this little package on the ground. The directions said to put it on the organ, keep it wet and it would prevent disease. And you know what… I haven’t had a cold all Winter”.
The parish priest fainted.
Image used under a Collective Commons License from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bell_Organ_and_Piano_Co._pump_organ,_Semaphore,_South_Australia.jpg