great. Even in this play, which Mr. Colum intends as a study of the artistic temperament, the land is a motive second only to the call of the road. Maire cared somewhat for the land, less than her sister cared, more than her father cared, though he too loved it in so far as the artist's gypsy nature will permit. It is the road and his music, however, that Conn cares for most, and in his expression of such love he attains to an eloquence that is Mr. Colum at his best: "I'm leaving the land behind me, too; but what's the land, after all, against the music that comes from the far strange places, when the night is on the ground, and the bird in the grass is quiet?" As one reads, aloud, as one must, one thinks now of the Old Testament and now of Synge.
Although Mr. Colum determined to put aside thoughts of dramas of old Ireland in 1900, he evidently could not keep the old legends out of his mind. They intrude now and then into his verses for all his modernity, and one of them, "The Destruction of the House of Da Derga," forced him to turn it into a play. "The Destruction of the Hostel" has not been published, but it seems to have pleased those who saw and heard it as played by the boys of St. Enda's School on February 5, 1910.
In the last play, too, of Mr. Colum, the ending is a parting, here the parting that death brings. Telling the fortunes of poor old Thomas Muskerry, who in the end dies a pauper in the workhouse where once he was master, the play opens our eyes to that life of the small town, deadliest of lives the world over, a life knowing neither the freedom of the farm nor the freedom of the city, as
