that he did not notice the catastrophe or the quick disappearance of the eggs among the coals. When his perfervidness subsided for a moment, he turned to see if they were done. "There, what did I tell you!" said he; "our talk of these things has conjured up the powers and the eggs are gone." Sharp did not tell him of the accident. And there were no more eggs in the room to have for lunch.
One of the reasons that led William Sharp to write "Silence Farm" (1899) was to have something under his own name that might be very different from the stories of "Fiona Macleod." And "Silence Farm" is very different, a story without the distinguishing qualities of "Pharais" or "The Divine Adventure," and suggesting kinship to the work of his other self only through certain likenesses of domestic irregularity in the family of Archibald Ruthven to other domestic irregularity in the family of Torcall Cameron of "The Mountain Lovers." Though not of so original a kind, perhaps, as the best of the "Fiona Macleod" work, "Silence Farm" has to it a "wholeness of good tissue" that belongs to little work of this most uneven writer. "Silence Farm," I would emphasize again as I emphasized at the opening of this paper, is better written, both as regards style and architectonic quality, and it is a truer reading of life, than any of the Highland stories. Though it is a story of to-day, and about a life much like that made familiar by the writers of the Kailyard school, it is not to them, but to such kindred unsentimentalized work as Mr. Shan Bullock's, that you instinctively compare it. The people, indeed, are the same
