in bogland is not a lonely place to the Irish peasant if he have neighbors of long standing. It is the big city that to him at home seems the lonely place, despite the glamour of its lights, and its shops, and its ceaseless excitements.
The story of "The Land" is, as I have said, the story of the struggle between love of land and the Wanderlust, with the love of woman as the decisive factor in the latter's victory. Matt Cosgar is the son of a peasant farmer, the last of many that the hardness of Murtagh has driven to America, and he, too, goes in the end, after his father's will is broken, because the girl of his choice is restless and will not be content as a farmer's wife. Matt and Ellen, the fit and the strong, go to America, Cornelius and Sally, the hair-brained and the drudge, remain. Symbolic this is, of course, of the situation in Ireland to-day, or at least yesterday, but the characters are strongly individualized and show no tendency to harden into types. In "The Land" the restlessness of youth, its call to wander, is the motive that clashes with love of the home and of the home place. In "The Fiddler's House" there is youth desiring peace, and youth afraid of love, in Annie and Maire Hourican; and the call of the road to old Conn, the fiddler. Sacrifice is rare in youth, and if it were not that Maire is afraid of her love for Brian McConnell, and gives up her home and takes to the road with her father partly because she fears her love for her lover, fears her powerlessness with him, it would hardly be in the course of nature that she would sacrifice so much for her sister. It was a sure instinct that guided Mr. Colum so to make believable a sacrifice at first view seemingly so
