or husband of a squaw. The Englishman and his squaw have a little boy who has reached the age of four or five years when news comes from England that the father is heir to a noble title, and that the woman for whose love he left England is now a widow still young and beautiful, and waiting for him. He refuses to budge. He would not desert even a dog that had been so faithful to him as has his Indian wife. But he is finally persuaded to send his son to England to be educated for the high position that awaits him. The little squaw, however, cannot consent to be separated from her child, and kills herself when it is taken from her.

The Irish playwrights, whose work has recently delighted large audiences throughout the English-speaking world, have given us at least two plays centered upon motherhood: The Riders to the Sea by John M. Synge, and The Gaol Gate by Lady Gregory. Both are, profoundly touching, largely because of the extraordinary beauty of the lines, which are like prose lyrics inspired by passionate feeling. The Riders to the Sea resembles some of Ibsen's work, especially Rosmersholm in the supernatural background, and various plays of Ibsen in the degree to which the dialogue reveals the past even while it carries the story to its end. A mother of the Arran Islands, on the west coast of Ireland, has lost her sons by shipwreck, one after another, until now Bartley, the last, is about to embark even while a storm is threatening and when supernatural omens of disaster are manifest. Bartley is deaf to prayer and entreaty and suffers the fate

of his brothers. When he is brought home on a stretcher the keening of the mother rises to a solemn chant of magnificent power. In poetic beauty there has been no such play in our language since the great plays of Shakespeare. The almost bald simplicity of the plot is redeemed by numerous little touches that reveal the author's peculiar intimacy with the life of the Arran Islanders. Alike on the stage and in the closet the illusion of reality is powerfully sustained by this moving masterpiece. Especially brilliant, subtle and original is the note of triumph and consolation that blends with the mother's chant of sorrow. Even the present sorrow is less painful to her than the eternal fear and suspense which have been well nigh her whole portion as a mother of sea-faring sons. This is not unmaternal; and it is wonderfully human.

Lady Gregory's The Gaol Gate is a very short play. Two old women, one of them the mother, come to the jail before dawn, to hear the last words of a young man who is involved in a murder case. They have heard that he has informed against his associates. But after long waiting they hear that the young man is already dead, and has betrayed nobody. The peculiar horror in which the Irish peasants hold one who turns king's evidence is the underlying sentiment of the play. And the aged mother's keening is as a song of triumph that her son did not betray his associates. It has been my privilege to hear Lady Gregory herself read from this play, whose literary beauty she especially knows how to bring out.

Isben's Ghosts is a powerful play expressing not

only the dire effects of heredity, but also the long and terrible misery of a woman who lives with a dissipated husband, to find in the end that the life of her son is ruined by the dissipation of the father. Maternity by Brieux is a protest against the efforts of the French government to increase the population; a plea that motherhood is always sacred even when it is the result of crime; and a protest against a French law forbidding legal inquiry into the paternity of an illegitimate child. Adequately to discuss the propositions inculcated by this play would require a long space. The play contains much that is stimulating and thought-provoking, and exhibits considerable dramaturgic skill.

Of course, these examples do not exhaust the subject of the mother in drama. Yet it is true that plays specially illustrative of motherhood are singularly, and indeed unaccountably, scarce. And the field is nearly virgin soil for those who venture into it.

THE HAPPY HOUR

BY MARY FRANCES BUTTS

The busy day is over,

The household work is done;
The cares that fret the morning
Have faded with the sun;
And in the tender twilight,
I sit in happy rest,

With my precious rosy baby
Asleep upon my breast.

White lids with silken fringes
Shut out the waning light;
A little hand close folded,
Holds mamma's fingers tight;
And in their soft white wrappings
At last in perfect rest,

Two dainty feet are cuddled,
Like birdies in a nest.

All hopes and loves unworthy
Fade out at this sweet hour;
All pure and noble longings
Renew their holy power;
For Christ, who in the Virgin
Our motherhood has blest,
Is near to every woman
With a baby on her breast.

EUGENE FIELD ON MOTHERHOOD

BY IDA COMSTOCK BELOW

While his love and thoughtfulness for children was one of his greatest charms, both in his life and writings, he did more to elevate motherhood than any other writer of the present day.

The women he admired most were not the devotees of fashion, nor even those of the higher literary attainments, unless they also best loved their own firesides and to rock the cradle. The mother-love is nowhere more beautifully portrayed than in the story

of "Félice and Petit Poulain," where an old family horse is seized by the German soldiers while marching upon France, and driven many miles away; after a fierce battle, riderless and blood-stained she gallops over the country back to the little colt she left behind, only to find him dead amid the ruins of the farmyard. I quote from that story this little tribute to our animal friends:

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There are those who say that none but humankind is immortal- that none but man has a soul. I do not make or believe that claim. There is that within me which tells me that nothing in this world and life of ours which has felt the grace of maternity shall utterly perish, and this I say in all reverence, and with the hope that I offend neither God nor man."

MOTHER'S LOVE

BY THOMAS BURBIDGE

He sang so wildly, did the Boy,
That you could never tell

If 'twas a madman's voice you heard,
Or if the spirit of a bird

Within his heart did dwell:

A bird that dallies with his voice

Among the matted branches;

Or on the free blue air his note

To pierce, and fall, and rise, and float,
With bolder utterance launches.

None ever was so sweet as he,