city folk will listen
to his poor ould ballads with the heart of the boy singing through
them? It's only us--it's only us. I say, as knows the long wild
nights, and the wet and the rain and the mist of nights on the
boglands--it's only us, I say, could listen him in the right way.
And ye knowed, right well ye knowed, that every string of his
fiddle was keyed to the crying of your own heart.

There is no beauty at all in "The Drone." There is little beauty
possible to such a subject realistically treated as that of the exposure
of the utter sham that is the pretended inventor of a bellows, a man who
has for years fattened on a brother's tolerance and family pride. There
might have been beauty of construction, but dramatic construction is not
Mr. Mayne's strongest quality. Let that not be held too much against
him, for many an English dramatist, like almost every English novelist,
is weak in the architectonic qualities of his work. Yet such is the
hardness of the people that exposed Daniel Murray that you rejoice in
his duping of them at the end through his sale to them of his pretended
invention, especially as that frees his brother John, and John's
daughter, artful coax that she is, from Sarah McMinn, who is determined
to marry the one and manage the two. The ideals of the people of the
play and the grim humor of Mr. Mayne are well illustrated by this
declaration of John Murray, the best of them all, anent the suit for
breach of promise with which Sarah threatens him: "I would as soon do
without the marrying if I could. I don't want the woman at all, but I'll
marry her before she gets a ha'penny off me."

The people here are the people of "The Squireen" of Mr. Bullock,--hard,
grasping, resentful, passionate, brutal even, but doers of the world's
work. All that differentiates them from the Fermanagh Protestants is the
different conditions of County Down and a slightly lower social
position.

In "The Troth" the theme is the shooting of a landlord by two peasants
whom his agents are to evict on the morrow. To the cottage of the
Protestant McKie comes his Catholic neighbor, Francey Moore, whose wife
is dying. Here there is no turf for the fire, and no hope in the heart
of father or mother, for the child of the house has died, and, they
think, because of the landlord's hardness to them. The two men swear a
troth that they shall lie in wait for Colonel Fotheringham, and that if
but one escapes