depths of the
glen.

"Philip dragged up his coat by one of its arms and fled after
her."

Here, then, in Sulby Glen, the girl stakes her last throw--the last
throw of every woman--and wins. It is the woman--a truly Celtic
touch--who wooes the man, and secures her love and, in the end, her
shame.

"When a good woman falls from honour, is it merely that she is
the victim of a momentary intoxication, of stress of passion, of
the fever of instinct? No. It is mainly that she is the slave of
the sweetest, tenderest, most spiritual, and pathetic of all
human fallacies--the fallacy that by giving herself to the man
she loves she attaches him to herself for ever. This is the real
betrayer of nearly all good women that are betrayed. It lies at
the root of tens of thousands of the cases that make up the
merciless story of man's sin and woman's weakness. Alas! it is
only the woman who clings the closer. The impulse of the man is
to draw apart. He must conquer it, or she is lost. Such is the
old cruel difference and inequality of man and woman as Nature
made them--the old trick, the old tragedy."

And meanwhile Pete is not dead; but recovered, and coming home.

Here, on p. 125, ends the second act of the drama: and the telling has
been quite masterly. The passage quoted above has hitherto been the
author's solitary comment. Everything has been presented in that fine
objective manner which is the triumph of story-telling. As I read, I
began to say to myself, "This is good"; and in a little while, "Ah,
but this is very good"; and at length, "But this is amazing. If he can
only keep this up, he will have written one of the finest novels of
his time." The whole story was laid out so easily; with such humor,
such apparent carelessness, such an instinct for the right stroke in
the right place, and no more than the right stroke; the big
scenes--Pete's love-making in the dawn and Kate's victory in Sulby
Glen--were so poetically conceived (I use the adverb in its strictest
sense) and so beautifully written; above all, the story remained so
true to the soil on which it was constructed. A sworn admirer of Mr.
Brown's _Betsy Lee_ and _The Doctor_ has no doubt great advantage over
other people in approaching _The Manxman_. Who, that has read his
_Fo'c's'le Yarns_ worthily, can fail to feel kindly towards the little
island and its shy, home-loving folk? And--by