lover, Commander Lyle, plainly sees. So the North of Ireland man never gives up hope of winning her. Mrs. Font vulgarly throws Mask and Agnes together, in her determination that they shall make a match of it, and as vulgarly tells Lyle the girl is not for him. Mask cannot but marry Agnes, Mrs. Font thinks, if Agnes has a large fortune. To secure the fortune and the lord for her daughter, Mrs. Font determines to get Guy Font out of the way. Her purpose coincides with her peasant belief that he is a "changeling," and is really of the sea people. So she goes with him to a sea cave he is fond of visiting, and only she comes from the cave. She is suspected, but before the officers come for her, she learns that her crime has defeated its own end. Mask is driven mad by the loss of his friend and, seeking to join him by the sea, is overwhelmed and drawn out by the undertow. As the officers come to arrest her, Mrs. Font hangs herself from the landing of the great staircase of Font Hill with the rope Guy used there as a swing.
"The Enchanted Sea" is cruder, colder, more amateurish than the two other plays of its class, full of the sort of talk that falls from the lips of a boy of seventeen just awakened to ideals. Its characters act as openly and as petulantly as children. Mrs. Font, really fine in conception, is in realization only a typical villain of the cheap melodrama; and Commander Lyle, of the Royal Navy, a man of thirty, is as childish in love as a schoolboy whose beloved takes an ice from his rival at a church festival.
What Mr. Martyn could have done with "A Tale of a Town," had he been willing to learn when opportunity
