many other forms of wealth. Let one example suffice. Ireland, above all other countries in Europe, is abundantly supplied with inland waters -rivers, lakes, ponds-and with innumerable streams and streamlets which are capable of being converted into ponds. As grounds for the scientific breeding, development, and capture of fish these great natural possessions yield now almost nothing. Yet the Committee are able to show in their report that in Hungary, owing to that joint action between which the State and the individual is the rule there, the very inferior Hungarian waters are, at the present moment, worth some thirty-five shillings an acre. Travelling over our other sources of wealth, the Recess Committee tell the same cheerful tale.

The practical proposal of the Committee is as follows :—They propose that Parliament should establish a Ministry of Agriculture and Industries for Ireland. They propose that it shall consist of a Board, with a Minister responsible to Parliament at its head, and be advised by a Consultative Council, representative of the agricultural and industrial interests of the country. This Agricultural and Industrial Department, besides undertaking new duties, shall assume the functions of all such State Departments in Ireland as at present discharge, or seem to discharge, functions of that nature, so as to bring into unity and under central control all existing State effort in that direction. The Consultative Council, at whose deliberations the Minister and his Board must be present and assist, is an essential and vital element of the whole scheme. So, between the scheme of the Recess Committee and the purpose underlying the co-operative movement, there is a preexistent harmony which suggests that a statesmanlike mind of a highly practical order and great sagacity has been at work behind both. The Consultative Council already exists in the elected representatives of the co-operative societies. It is still in its infancy, but in a very few years the Consultative Council will be full grown and fit to discharge its proper work, viz., that of laying before the Minister and his Board what it conceives to be the industrial needs of the country, and of co-operating with him for legislative and administrative purposes. When these two bodies, viz., the State Department for Irish Agriculture and Industries and the Consultative Council, begin to work together sure and rapid progress ought to be the result: at least, in the absence. of some great and utterly unexpected degree of mismanagement on the part of the State or of folly on the part of the people.

STANDISH O'GRADY.

THE DEATH OF O'SULLIVAN THE RED

I

T came about gradually that O'Sullivan ceased to stray from the neighbourhood of Cope's Mountain and Lug-na-gall, making even his necessary journeys to the town for food seldomer and seldomer. The little leather bag, in which there was still some silver and copper money, hung by the hearth-side undisturbed; nor did he seem to endure the pangs of half-starvation, although his hand had grown heavy on the staff and his cheeks hollow. His favourite business was to sit looking into the long narrow lough which cherishes the gaunt image of Crug-na-Moonagh, and to wander in the little wood of larch and hazel and ash upon its border; and as the days passed it was as though he became incorporate with some more poignant and fragile world whose marchlands are the intense colours and silences of this world. Sometimes he would hear in the little wood a fitful music which was forgotten like a dream the moment it had ceased, and once in the deep silence of noon he heard there a sound like the continuous clashing of many swords; while at sundown and at moon-rise the lake grew like a gateway of ivory and silver, and from its silence arose faint lamentations, a vague, shivering laughter, and many pale and beckoning hands.

He was sitting looking into the water one autumn evening where the lough comes nearest the green slope whereon the sacrilegious men-atarms had fallen heaped together, while the piper of the Shee, who had lured them over the edge of Lug-na-gall, rode through the upper air whirling his torch, when a cry began towards the west, at first distant and indistinct, but getting nearer and louder as the shadows gathered. "I am beautiful, I am beautiful," were the words, "the birds in the air, the moths. under the leaves, the flies over the water look at me; for they never saw any one as beautiful as I am. I am young, I am young! Look at me, mountains! look at me, perishing woods! for my body will gleam like the white waters when you have been hurried away. You and the races of men, and the races of the animals, and the races of the fish, and the winged races, are dropping like a guttering candle; but I laugh aloud, remembering my youth!" The cry would cease from time to

time as though in exhaustion, and then begin once more: “I am beautiful, I am beautiful," and repeat the same words and in the same monotonous chant. Presently the hazel branches at the edge of the little wood trembled for a moment and an old woman forced her way from among them and passed O'Sullivan with slow deliberate steps. Her face was the colour of earth, and incredibly wrinkled, and her white hair hung about it in tangled and discoloured locks, and through her tattered clothes showed here and there her dark weather-roughened skin. She passed with wide-open eyes and lifted head, and arms hanging straight down, and was lost in the shadow of the mountains towards the north. O'Sullivan looked after her with a shudder; for he recognised crazy Whinny O'Byrne, who went from barony to barony begging her bread and crying always the same cry, and remembered that she was once so wise that the women of her village sought her counsel in all things; and had so beautiful a voice that men and women came from a distance of many miles to hear her sing at wake or wedding; but the people of the Shee stole her wits a summer night fifty years before, while she sat crooning to herself on the edge of the sea, and dreaming of Cleena, who rushes with unwrinkled feet among the foam.

The cry died away up the hillside, the last faint murmurs coming, as it seemed, out of the purple deep, where the first stars were glimmering like little fluttering white moths.

A cold wind was creeping among the reeds, and O'Sullivan began to shiver and to sigh, and to think of the hearth where his fire of turf would be still making a little warm and kind, if dwindling, world under the broken thatch. He toiled slowly up the hill, bowed as by an immense burden that grew the greater as he passed, where he had seen the unhappy lovers, that are in fairyland, walking on the dark air with august feet, because the thought of them made his exile from beauty and from youth so bitterly poignant. The old yew above his cabin looked the more malignant from dwelling at so great a height, an outcast from among its kind, and seemed to uplift its dark branches like withered hands, threatening the stars and the purple deep they fluttered in with the coming of decay and shadowy old age. He mounted upon the rock-whose partial shelter had doubtless enabled it to be rooted firmly, before its branches received the burden of all the winds-and looked towards the south, for there he had been last loved and made his last verses. A little black spot was moving from the hills and woods,

between the mountain of Balligawley and the lake of Castle Dargan, and, while he watched, it grew larger and larger, until he knew it for a wide-winged bird, and then for a spotted eagle with something glittering in its claws. It came swiftly towards him, flying straight onward as if upon a long journey or pondering some hidden purpose; and when it was nearly overhead he saw that the glittering thing was a large fish, which still writhed from side to side. Suddenly the fish made a last struggle and leaped out of its claws, and fell, with gasping mouth, into the branches of the yew tree. O'Sullivan had not eaten since the previous morning, and then but little, and, though he had been scarcely aware of his hunger hitherto, his hunger came upon him now so fiercely that he had gladly buried his teeth into the living fish. He hurled a heavy stone at the eagle, which had begun to circle with great clamour about the tree, and, having filled his caubeen with like stones, drove it screaming over the mountain eastward. He began then to climb the tree with a passionate haste, and had almost come to where the fish hung in the fork between two branches, glittering like a star among the green smoke of some Fomorian fire, when a branch broke under his hand and he fell heavily upon a rock, and from this rebounded again, striking first his back and then his head, and becoming unconscious at the last blow. The fire had already consumed his goods, and now those creatures of earth and air and water, that once endured his curse, had taken him in a subtle ambuscade.

A face was bent over him when he awoke, and, despite his weakness and bewilderment and suffering, he shuddered when the turf fire, now red and leaping, gleamed on the broken and blackened teeth, and on the mud-stiffened tatters, of Whinny O'Byrne. She watched him intently a little, for her slow senses appeared to need time to assure her that he was not dead; and then laid down the wet cloth which had bathed the blood from his face; and began stirring a pot, from which she drew presently a couple of potatoes and held them towards him with an inarticulate murmur. In so much of the night as was not spent in short and feverish sleep, he saw her moving hither and thither, or bending over the hearth with her wrinkled hands spread out above its flame; and once or twice he caught the words of her monotonous chant, subdued into a feeble murmur. At the dawn, he half raised himself with many pains and pointed to the leather bag by the hearthside. Whinny opened the bag and took out a little copper and silver money, but let it fall back again, not seeming to understand its purpose;

perhaps because she was accustomed to beg, not for money, but for potatoes and for fragments of bread and meat, and perhaps because the persuasion of her own beauty was coming upon her with a double passion in the exultation of the dawn. She went out and brought an armful of heather and heaped it over him, saying something about the morning being "cold, cold, and cold," and brought a dozen more armfuls and heaped them by the first until he was well covered; and went away down the mountain side; her cry of "I am beautiful, I am beautiful," dying slowly in the distance.

O'Sullivan lay through the day, enduring much pain; and scarce able even to wonder if Whinny O'Byrne had left him for good, or but to come again and divide with him the gains of her begging. A little after sundown he heard her voice on the hillside, and that night she made up his fire and cooked her potatoes and divided them with him as before. Some days passed in this way, and the weight of his flesh was heavy about him, but gradually, as he grew weaker, it seemed to him that there were powers close at hand, and growing always more numerous, who might, in the wink o' an eye, break down the rampart the sensuality of pain had builded about him, and receive him into their world. Even as it was he had moments when he heard faint, ecstatic, reedy voices, crying from the roof tree or from the flame of the hearth; while at other moments the room was brimmed with a penetrating music. After a little, weakness brought a vanishing of pain and a slow blossoming of silence, in which, like faint light through a mist, the ecstatic reedy voices came continually. One morning he heard music, somewhere outside the door, and as the day passed it grew louder and louder until it drowned the ecstatic reedy voices, and even Whinny's voice upon the hillside at sundown. About midnight, and in a moment, the walls seemed to melt away and to leave his bed floating in a misty and pale light, which glimmered on each side to an incalculable distance; and after the first blinding of his eyes he saw that it was full of faint and great figures rushing hither and thither. the same moment the music became so distinct, that he understood it was but the continuous clashing of swords. "I am dead," he repeated, "and in the midst of the music of heaven. O Cherubim and Seraphim, receive my soul!" At his cry the light, where it was nearest, filled with sparks of more intense light, and he saw that these were the points of swords turned towards his heart, and then a sudden flame, dazzling, as it seemed, like a divine passion, swept over all the light and went

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