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traction that the old fairy stories have always had for children. For all their topsyturvydom they are simple, and deal with life as they themselves view it.

And simplicity has always attracted children. It was no gorgeous description that attracted them to the household tales of the Brothers Grimm, and afterwards to Andersen's legends. It is the simplicity of the tales that charms them, they feel that they are the real thing and they instinctively know that there is nothing stagey or affected about them. They are intellegible and easy of comprehension by the child-mind. The stories enter on no wild flights of romance, but run easily and smoothly among everyday paths of life, so that it requires no great imagination to follow them. They are the tales of the common folk handed down from a period long before the dawn of history, easily understood by man and child alike. Moreover, they are not extravagant or out of proportion, and this is a point that children appreciate, for they have a larger sense of proportion than "children's writers" suppose.

prefer

Most children infinitely Grimm's stories of the Geese Maidens and the shepherd lads set in their native surroundings to all the glories of gilded palaces and the Eastern gorgeousness of the "Arabian Nights": in very much the same way that we prefer the Mab and Puck of Shakespeare in their woodland homes to Herrick's fairies, for all the glories of Oberon's palace, or his Temple "enchassed with glass and beads."

For children lack imagination pure and simple. They can elaborate anything they have seen or heard minutely described until it is well-nigh unrecognizable, but the power of creation or grasping anything to which they possess no former clue is a flight to which they do not easily rise. The

wonderment of the new idea stupefies them. They prefer to play their stories among the scenes with which they are familiar, to groping in their half-furnished minds after those strange mis-shapen ideas, high and fantastical with which the grown mind amuses itself.

If a topic or conception be in essence above a child's range, no amount of simplicity in the treatment will make it interesting to him. Children also like plenty of action in their stories. They are such restless beings, they must be up and doing; they love to hear of fighting dragons, rescuing princesses, and-with the exception of high-strung nervous childrenthey revel in "bluggy stories," as did the little hero in "Helen's Babies." Stories of giants who would make their meals off the favorite hero (who, in spite of his undoubted superiority of wit and wisdom, his manly beauty and his somewhat ostentatious virtues, is invariably despised by his family, and sent to seek his fortune as best he can), have always and will always attract the infant mind; while of Biblical stories nothing appeals as strongly to the juvenile taste and imagination as the story of David and Goliath, except, perhaps, the slaying of Abel by his brother Cain. How many times these scenes have been acted in nursery theatricals will never be known.

Perhaps one of the strongest tests of popularity that can be applied to a storybook is whether it is considered sufficiently interesting to be acted in the nursery. "A good acting book is worth all the others put together," was the verdict of a schoolroom critic who had views upon the subject of juvenile fiction. Certainly, this love of mimicry in children should not be overlooked by the stormers of the nursery library. And here, again, the grown-up audience will have to be entirely put aside, and the author be

prepared to give explicit details as to how everything is done.

Half the popularity of "Robinson Crusoe" is due to the fact that there is so much doing in the book, and such minute details are given as to how everything was accomplished. Had the author kept his eye on the grownup audience while he wrote, he might, and very probably would, have left out the greater part of the book-the very part that makes it intelligible to children-leaving it to the imagination of his readers. But, fortunately, he realized that the child's experience was too incomplete to supply the in The Academy.

formation, and that it was beyond the scope of childhood to imagine all the resources open to Crusoe. It is this art of getting in touch with children that writers of to-day lack. The adults will keep coming between the story-teller and his audience and spoiling the tale for both.

Let him who would write for Youth go to the old authors, and try and discover the secret of holding the child's fancy. Else, for all the attention of the best authors of to-day, the art of simple story-telling, which is the attraction of men and children alike, will soon be lost.

SINCE WE SHOULD PART.

(Founded upon an old Gaelic Love Song, and to an air in the Petrie Collection.)

Since we should part, since we should part,

The weariness and lonesome smart

Are going greatly through my heart.

Upon my pillow, ere I sleep,

The full of my two shoes I weep,

And like a ghost all day I creep.

"Tis what you said you'd never change,

Or with another ever range,

Now even the Church is cold and strange.

Together there our seats we took,

Together read from the one book;
But with another now you look.

And when the service it was o'er,
We'd walk and walk the flowery floor,
As we shall walk and walk no more.
For now beneath the starry glow,
While ye step laughing light and low,
A shade among the shades I go.

The Spectator.

Alfred Perceval Graves.

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It is sometimes said that the Irish character has been profoundly altered during the past half century. In the Dublin Press may occasionally be read appeals in support of this movement or that movement-the Irish Literary Theatre, it may be, or the Gaelic League as a means of resisting what is called the "denationalization" or the "Anglicization" of the Irish race, or, in other words, the wide-spread assimilation of English habits and English ideas by the people of Ireland. These generalizations appear to me to be founded on superficial observation. Some idea of the nature of the evidence on which they are often based is afforded by a letter which appeared in a Dublin newspaper a short time ago. The writer bewailed that the country was becoming completely Cockneyfied because he had heard "Ta-ra-ra-Boomde-ay" (a tune which in its inevitable course round the British Empire took a couple of years to reach the remote parts of Ireland) whistled by a small boy in a village. What nonsense! For my part after some years' experience of other peoples, every return visit I pay to Ireland more and more convinces me that the Irish are still intensely Irish. I know from personal observation that even during the past twentyfive years the outward aspect of many things in Ireland has undoubtedly al

tered-in some respects for the better, in other relations for the worse-yet, despite these changes, which the spread of education, the almost universal reading of newspapers and periodicals, the penny post, the cheapness and facility of travelling, inevitably bring in their train; and despite, also, the increase in the influence of English opinions and English habits in Ireland, the Irish peasant of to-day is in nature and temperament, in thoughts, feelings and aspirations-in every racial characteristic in fact-fashioned in the same mould as his grandfather.

First among the changes noticeable on the surface of things in Ireland is the gradual disappearance of the old mud-wall cabin. The dwellings of the people are divided in the Irish Census returns into four classes. The fourth class comprises mud cabins, or cabins built of perishable material, having only one room and one window. In 1841, the year in which dwellings were first included in the Census returns, there were as many as 491,278 of these cabins in Ireland. In 1891-the last return available-the number had fallen to 20,617. Unhappily, these figures are not to be accepted solely as an indication of a vast and gratifying improvement in the dwellings of the Irish peasantry during the past half century. There is a dismal side as well

as a bright side to these statistics. The population during the same period has also enormously decreased. In 1841 it was 8,196,597; last year it was 4,585,000. There were close on twice as many people in Ireland in 1840 as there are to-day; and of the 4,000,000 which the country has lost during the intervening sixty years, the vast bulk was composed of the humble dwellers of these mud-wall cabins. Famine, eviction and emigration-these, I regret to say, are the forces to which the marvellous reduction of the hovels from 491,278 to 20,617 in sixty years are mainly due. This is made clear by the fact that from 1841 to 1861-twenty years during which the clearances of the cottier population from most estates went steadily on, and the broad streams of emigrants poured continuously to the seaports of the countryover 400,000 mud-wall cabins had disappeared. But undoubtedly the decrease in the number of fourth-class houses in Ireland, is I am glad to say, also due, to a considerable extent, to the happy circumstance that better house accommodation for the humbler classes of the peasantry has been provided in recent years by the landlords and the large farmers, and especially by the Boards of Guardians under the Agricultural Laborers (Ireland) Act of 1883.

Still, the mud-wall cabin is yet a rather familiar feature of the Irish landscape. It may be seen during a short train journey, a car drive, or even a walk in some districts of the South and West of Ireland; and a curious human habitation it is, as a rule. But it has too often suggested feeble and ill-feeling jokes about Irish dirt and Irish squalor by coldly critical visitors to Ireland for me-familiar as I am with the kindly natures, the loving qualities, the splendid domestic virtues of the occupants-to enter one of these lowly dwellings in any spirit

but the spirit of sympathy and affection. Those who know the wayward history of the Irish peasantry-unhappy victims of perverse historical and economic causes-will not find anything in that humble dwelling to sneer at or deride. We shall see there something to arouse pity, something to kindly reprove, something to smile at, much to admire and respect, and little that is censurable for which a good excuse cannot be advanced. Its walls are built of the mud scraped from the roadway, a small glazed aperture close to the low door acts as a window, and the roof is rudely thatched with straw, rushes, or reeds. There is a story of an English visitor to Ireland who, having being caught in a heavy shower, sought shelter in one of these wayside cabins. He found the rain streaming through the thin roof of thatch, and a peasant huddled up in the only dry corner near the fireplace. "My good man," said the traveller, "why is it you do not repair the roof?" "Yerra, is it in this peltin' rain you'd be wantin' me to do it?" replied the peasant. “Oh, I don't mean that you should do it now," said the traveller. "But why not do it in the fine weather?" "In the foine weather is it?" exclaimed the peasant in astonishment. where would be the use of it thin?" A laughable story, perhaps, but I would not care to vouch for its accuracy. There are, I admit, some leaking roofs in the cabins of Ireland; but that they are not repaired is due to poverty rather than to the laziness of the Irish peasant, or to his occasional inability to see the incongruity of a situation.

"Shure

In the island of Achill, off the Mayo coast, which I have often visited, the materials used in the construction of the cabins are flat slaty stones called "cobbles," found on the beaches, with edges rounded and polished by the action of the waves; mortar made of mud and sand, and the roof is covered

by a thin thatching of the straws of the rye, a rough kind of grain which is commonly grown on the island. Some of the best cabins have also external and internal coats of this mixture of mud and sand laid on the walls, and the floor consists of the same composition. The shifts to which the natives of Achill are driven to obtain manure for the small patches of cultivable land which they have rescued from the surrounding wastes of sterile mountain and barren moor, are of an extraordinary character. One of these expedients profoundly affects their domestic comfort.

The manure used is of two kindssoot and seaweed. To obtain the seaweed the islanders have deposited, a long way out to sea from the beaches, large stones brought from the mountain tops, many miles inland. The seaweed grows in time on these stones and is collected yearly by the island

ers.

But the two devices for procuring soot are still more curious. One is the erection on the tilled fields of little huts called "scraw-hogues"-formed of "scraws," or sods of heather from the mountains-in which a turf or peat fire is kept burning for six weeks or two months, at the end of which period the "scraws" are, from the continual impregnation with smoke, transformed into soot. But the most striking of all proofs of the dire necessity for manure and the difficulty of its obtainment in Achill, is afforded by the custom of the peasantry in actually blocking the chimneys of their cabins (when the hovels have chimneys, which is not always the case) with "scraws" loading a sort of shelf constructed over the hob, and filling every available nook and corner of the cabin with these sods of heather, and keeping a big fire -turf being in abundance on the island-continually burning on the hearth. Almost every cabin I entered, and I have been in dozens, was, as a

consequence of this custom, filled with a black cloud of smoke which prevented me discerning the surroundings, and dimmed even the blazing fire on the hearth. The bleared red eyes, the singed eyelids, the affected lungs of the aged men and women who necessarily spend most of their time indoors, are some of the results of living in this perpetual atmosphere of smoke and soot. But it must be endured if the po tatoes are to be produced, and starvation-a more horrible fate-is to be averted.

On entering one of these cabins for the first time, I said in a tone of surprise to my companion, the parish priest of the island: "Is there no chimney?" "Chimbley is it?" exclaimed a voice from out the dim profound of the thick black cloud of blinding and suffocating smoke. "Shure the roof is full of chimbleys." It was the voice of the man of the house. Even in the midst of privation and distress the Irish peasant cannot help letting a gleam of humor play across the gloom. I looked up and sure enough the bright blue sky was discernible through some holes in the thatch.

A wisp of burning straw, held in the hand of one of the inmates, enabled me to dimly see the contents of the hovel. I observed there was one room only, measuring about twelve feet by six, a corner of which was cut off by boards for the accommodation of a donkey and a pig and a roost for poultry. Its articles of furniture were a rude deal table, two stools, a couple of delf mugs on a shelf, a "kish" or basket, a pot suspended from an iron crane over the fire, and on the floor in a corner a sorry substitute for a bed. The cabin was occupied by a family of six, husband, wife and three children and a grandmother; and the holding attached to it consisted of three acres, half of which was in tillage, the crops being rye and potatoes. The rent paid by

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