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prosperous of Sir Anthony's sons, could no longer be counted upon to do anything for Clew. Clew began to need things done for it. It had arrived at that stage of dilapidation when, as Sir Anthony said, it was only held together by the ivy. Other people in his position were letting or selling. Sir Anthony would neither let nor sell, nor would he part with one of the beautiful things which seemed SO much a part of Clew, that it would have been terrible to have torn them asunder.

"It will last our time, Alice," he said, "and it will fall on John's head one day when he comes to own it. John shall have Clew. No one else will want it. Do you remember the old monk we found in that Convent in Portugal, long broken-up and deserted? Only a few of the country people knew he was there and brought him food. How scared he looked when we opened the door of his crumbling cell! John will be like that amid the ruins of Clew."

"Unless Tony were to make his fortune after all," said Madam. "If Tony made his fortune he would come home and share with John. He was always a good-natured boy. Do you remember how Dom and dear Brian used to impose on his good nature in the nursery?"

To speak of Brian was always a difficult thing with Madam, but of late she had steeled herself to do it, though she never spoke the name without a tremor of her face.

"It is much more likely that John will make his own fortune by his newly-acquired habits of business," Sir Anthony said, and laughed. "We shall ask Mr. Sweeney about it when he comes. Mr. Sweeney might find a place for John in his store, if you could spare him."

John's business habits were a matter of grim jest to his father, as were

John's poems. John had discovered that there was a market for salmon and game, a thing that would never have occurred to Sir Anthony. When the game-larder was fully stocked the pheasants and the grouse and the salmon had always been given away to anyone who would take them. No doubt there had been a deal of waste at Clew in the old days. Considine, the butler, small and gray as an old rat, who lingered on at Clew in the days of its impoverishment, referred regretfully to the times when the beggars sat three deep by the kitchen door to be fed, and disdaining the delicacies given to them, threw them to the dogs. The beggars did not care for game.

""Twas the same as the Poorhouse," said Considine. "Every ould dog that had no other place to go to came to Clew, an' the same wid the beggars. The dogs were civil enough, though their tails was a disgrace to be seen at a place like Clew. I remember an oul' tarrier an' the tail of him was a yard long. Her Ladyship used to pick them up when they wor strayed by the people rather than pay the half crown for the tax. They used to fight a lot between themselves, but they wor nothin' to the proud beggars. Bridget Sharkey, the kitchen-maid, said to an oul' wan wan day, 'Yez waste more nor yez ate.' 'Why wouldn't I?' says she, 'in a house o' this quality? It's only in the houses of the commonality that they're mane an' stint you. A good house,' she says, sittin' up an' lookin' like an oul' idol or a cluckin' hen, 'is a house where you waste three times what you ate.'

John, to whom this long reminiscence was addressed, was cleaning his gun in the butler's pantry while Considine polished the silver.

"They wasted too much," he said, coming out of his dreams. "That is

why the lean years are upon us now.

“Och, sure, a McGrady never took thought o' the morra," Considine said cheerfully. "They wor grand times when the fifty bedrooms was full, and the finest of atin' an' drinkin' an' card-playin' an' diversion goin' on. Sir Hugh McGrady of that day, I've heard tell, couldn't show his nose except of a Sunday for fear the bailiffs that was hidin' behind the trees in the park would nab him. But they wor grand days."

John was not proud of these glories. In his austere youthfulness he despised the carousals of his ancestors. He had a curious sense of order; although he went about in threadbare clothes that only held together because they were honest homespuns, and his boots were patched and his hair showed through a hole in his hat. These things did not trouble him. He cared so little that he might have known how his own beauty shone out of the careless clothing; for John was tall and supple as a young tree, and had Spanish coloring and moved with a slender rushing grace.

"It was a foolish and a wicked way to live," he said. "Sir Hugh ought to have been ducked in the river to get the wine out of him. Look at Clew now. If it isn't taken in hand soon there won't be much of it left in twenty years. Fifty bedrooms. What did anyone want with fifty bedrooms? And to build Clew on a hill where all the stone and materials had to be carried up! They built like Emperors, and roystered like fools and madmen, and left the lean days to us."

"Don't be blamin' the dead, Master John," said Cons dine, piously.

John, having finished cleaning his gun, went out. Somewhere on the sea-road, walking towards Cloughaneely, he encountered Mr. Sweeney. the Irish-American, who had spent the months of every summer since John

remembered at the little house next door to the post-office in Cloughaneely which belonged to Miss Horan the post-mistress. Mr. Sweeney had been born and reared in that little house till he had gone to America at ten years old. An enterprising owner had added to and enlarged it; but the kitchen was intact in which Mr. Sweeney, according to his own account, had run about barefoot and roasted potatoes at the turf-fire with his heels in the ashes, till the map of Ireland was printed on his legs by the burning of the fire.

"I didn't know you'd arrived, Mr. Sweeney," said John, stopping to speak to the little foxy-faced man in the very American suit of clothes, with the very American straw hat tilted at an acute angle over his eyes. "When did you come?"

"I arrived late last night, sir," said Mr. Sweeney. "And I wasn't half-glad either to get out of New York. The brains boiled under my hat before I left. I've been cooling down since then on the steamer: and the express yesterday gave me time to complete the process."

"You'll find it cooler here," said John. "The weather's been dry. I hope it will last till the hay is saved. There's a shower coming now over the mountains."

"There is so," said Mr. Sweeney. "I like it. I like to get completely saturated. My car-driver yesterday told me he'd got a gridiron for his patrons to sit on so they shouldn't sit in the wet. It is a good notion; but it don't apply to most countries, or else I'd patent it."

Mr. Sweeney turned about and walked with John, who had business at the post-office. The American was very friendly with the family at Clew. Sir Anthony liked to hear his shrewd business talk, and Madam's heart went out to the man who had two

sides to his character, the one revealed in the tight mouth and sharp face, the other in the mild brown eyes that had a certain remote likeness to John's

own.

Through the female line Mr. Sweeney claimed to belong to the clan of the McGradys. It was a claim the McGradys had no wish to disallow. Humbler people than Mr. Sweeney, scattered about in the villages, in the cabins on the side of the mountain, had the same claim. It added something to the heartiness of the handshake with which Sir Anthony would welcome Mr. Sweeney when they met, and the cordiality of Madam's smile; and it extenuated Mr. Sweeney's frankness when from time to time he touched on things with an intimacy not permissible to the stranger. Mr. Sweeney was, as Madam said, naturally well-bred. He never vexed Sir Anthony, who in those days was a bit prickly, for poverty galled when it meant such things as that his wife could have no successor to the horses, one of which had had to be shot because of old age, while the other had stumbled and broken his knees so badly that it was kind to shoot him as well. Madam missed her horses fretted for them as old friends. could no longer get about to visit friends at any distance, and she could not walk very far.

and She

The lack of money pinched on every side. No matter how little one asked for oneself, there were always things needing to be done if they were to keep the house over their heads. Even Tony's problematical fortune had gone out of sight since he had had pneumonia in the winter, and was to come home as soon as he was able to travel. The doctor wrote that Tony had had a bad shake. He would require a long rest and ease of mind and body, to build him up again and put his heart right. Sir Anthony fretted, while LIVING AGE, VOL. VIII, No. 403.

Madam only longed for the hour that was to bring Tony. He had been a drain to them-a considerable drain. Hitherto he had shown no repentance. If Sir Anthony was to kill the fatted calf for his prodigal, the prodigal ought to come in sackcloth and ashes.

"We are expecting my brother home very soon," John said, as he and Mr. Sweeney walked along the road to the village.

"He's a likely young fellow, I've heard," said Mr. Sweeney. "It don't matter if he hasn't struck oil yet. He has plenty of time so long as he don't play the fool."

"Oh," said John, "the McGradys have no talent for making money. Usually they know that they haven't, but Tony thought that he had. He went out there when he was twenty. Perhaps he has been playing the fool. twenty-four now, two years older

than I."

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"If you wanted to make money, Sonny," said Mr. Sweeney, laying a persuasive hand on John's sleeve, "you just come back with me this Fall."

"I couldn't," said John. "My mother is not strong. She needs me. I don't think Tony could make up to her for me."

He said it with a swelling heart. He liked to think that Tony could not make up.

"I forgot," said Mr. Sweeney, his brown eyes full of a wistful understanding. "You were the boy that could be detached from his mother nohow. There are some like it. I was the same myself, but I had to go to earn for my mother. I sent home every penny I could spare for five years. When I came back she hadn't long to live. 'Denis, love,' she said, 'when I'm gone you'll find an old stocking in a hole in the thatch, an' there's in it close on all the money you ever sent me. I was only your

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how, it was lucky money, for I never looked back from the time I had it." They were close to the village now. There was one long street of cabins with a few houses of two stories, the shop-McGroarty's as it was usually called the post-office, where the curate and the schoolmaster lodged; Hart's public house.

At this end of the village the neat, whitewashed police barracks wore an air of prosperity. The garden in front was full of flowers, a dog lay asleep on the flagged path; beyond the tight mass of flowers a young constable, his tunic unbuttoned, for the day was hot, was teaching the sergeant's baby its first steps, while the sergeant's wife looked from the doorway, smiling all over her comely face.

Mr. Sweeney pointed to the little scene. "Octavy-that's my daughter, sir-calls that an English outpost of law and order. When she took a walk yesterday the other member of the force, a red-haired young man, was washing potatoes at that stone seat and at the same time putting the dog through its tricks. Why don't they have gardens like that at all the cottages?"

"I don't know," said John. "My mother used to give prizes for gardens. There never was one that deserved the prize. They said it was all very well for Quality with nothing to do-not for the likes o' them. I believe

our folly amused them. Potatoes were the only crop they'd grow. But they are learning."

"We must help them to learn," said the American, gravely. "Octavy'll be in and out like a dog at a fair. You'll see!"

"So your daughter has come with you?"

"Octavy, just made out that she had to come. She's been wanting to any time since she was six. 'No, Octavy,' I always said. 'I don't want you to see Cloughaneely till it looks up a bit. Nor the country for the

matter of that. I don't want a child of mine to look down on the old country.'

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He looked before him down the irregular street. The greater portion of Cloughaneely lay out on the strand in straggling rows of thatched cottages.

"Why, here is Octavy! She's been putting to rights. She says the cottage is just too cunning for anything: and she's been worrying Miss Horan till she's got all she wants. That you, Octavy? This is Mr. John McGrady. You've heard me speak of the McGradys."

"I never heard you do anything else," remarked Miss Sweeney, looking at John with frank interest. Somehow John blushed. He had not credited Mr. Sweeney with a daughter like Miss Octavia.

(To be continued.)

MEREDITH AND OUR ALLIES.

No genuine reader of George Meredith can be unaware of his love for France. Appreciative references to

France and her people are scattered throughout his books. Last of all his publications, and containing some of

the maturest of his work, were his
Odes in Contribution to the Song of
French History. That volume con-
tains, too, the noble poem of France,
1870, which, written in December,
1870, when the German army was
about Paris, has the ring of the iron
reality as Europe knows it today:
We look for her that sunlike stood
Upon the forehead of our day,
An orb of nations, radiating food
For body and for mind alway.
Where is the shape of glad array;
The nervous hands, the front of steel,
The clarion tongue? Where the bold,
proud face?

We see a vacant place;
We hear an iron heel.

Those are the opening words of the poem; its closing ones are hardly less poignant:

Soaring France!

How is Humanity on trial in thee: How may'st thou gather humankind in fee:

Now prove that Reason is a quenchless scroll;

Make of calamity thine aureole,
And, bleeding, head us through the

troubles of the sea.

Thus Meredith wrote in 1870; twentyeight years later, in Alsace-Lorraine, we have, even more intimately, his belief: On France has come the test Of what she holds within.

Responsive to Life's deeper springs. She above the Nations blest In fruitful and in liveliest,

In all that servant earth to heavenly bidding brings.

And the belief is a clearly reasoned one; for this poem contrasts these qualities of spontaneity and elasticity with "the belted overshadower," Germany, "who contracts horizons within present sight" and "adamantine makes the mind."

Yet impressive as these great Odes to France are, they have their parallels in Swinburne's work, and, in some degree, in Browning's. Where Meredith

is alone is in his more incidental references. Renée we must all of us remember "brunette of the good blood of France"-"her features had the soft irregularities which run to rarities of beauty, as the ripple rocks the light": not so beautiful as the English Cecilia, but on which, Meredith asks, "does the eye linger longest? Which draws the heart? a radiant landscape where the tall, ripe wheat flashes between shadow and shine in the stately march of summer, or the peep into dewy woodland on dark water?" Alvan, in The Tragic Comedians, compares Clotilde with Paris-"his beloved of cities the symbolized goddess of the lightning brain that is quick to conceive, eager to realize ideas, impassioned for her hero, but ever putting him to the proof, graceful beyond all rhyme, colloquial as never the Muse; light in light hands, yet valiant unto death for a principle; and therefore not light, anything but light in strong hands, very steadfast rather." French people, One of Our Conquerors tells us, "are the most mixed of any European nation; so they are packed with contrasts: they are full of sentiment, they are sharply logical; freethinkers, devotees; affectionate, ferocious; frivolous, tenacious; the passion of the season operating like sun or moon on these qualities; and they can reach to ideality out of sensualism. Below your level, they're above it-a paradox is at home with them." "The most mixed of any European nation," that, from Meredith, is the choicest of compliments; for he is an enthusiast in regard to international marriages. His strong belief in the fast-arriving supremacy of the United States, among English-speaking peoples, is based mainly upon their cosmopolitanism and mingling of nationalities. In One of Our Conquerors, too, it is that Nesta, overwhelmed by Nataly's death and her father's mental seizure, seeks

The

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