n 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 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 such life is lived in Ireland.
In "Thomas Muskerry," in "The Land" and "The F