d that uplifts its voice to heaven.
Far off can be descried, across the sea, the Mull of Galloway. It is
in its rare beauty a spot than which, for a poet's childhood, no
fitter could be found.

[Illustration: MRS. HALL CAINE. From a photograph by Alfred Ellis,
London.]

CHILDHOOD IN A MANX COTTAGE.

The Ballavolley cottage was a typical Manx cottage. On one side of the
porch was the parlor, which also served as a dairy, redolent of milk
and bright with rare old Derby china. On the other side was the
living-room, with its undulating floor of stamped earth and grateless
hearthstone in the ingle, to the right and left of which were seats.
Here in the ingle-nook the little boy would sit watching his aunts
cooking the oaten cake on the griddle, over a fire of turf from the
curragh and gorse from the hills, or the bubbling cooking-pot slung on
the slowrie. One of his earliest recollections is of his old
grandmother, seated on her three-legged stool, bending over the fire,
tongs in hand, renewing the fuel of gorse under the griddle. The walls
of this room were covered with blue crockery ware, and through the
open rafters of the unplastered ceiling could be seen the flooring of
the bedrooms above. These were very low dormer rooms, with the bed in
the angle where the roof was lowest. One had to crawl into bed and lie
just under the whitewashed "scraa" or turf roofing, which smelt
deliciously with an odor that at times still haunts the cottage lad in
statelier homes.

[Illustration: HALL CAINE'S LIBRARY. From a photograph by Barton.]

Hall Caine's impressions of his life at Ballavolley are vivid--the old
preacher at the church, the drinking-bouts of "jough"-beer by the
gallon amongst the villagers, the donkey rides upon the curragh. But
what it best pleases him to remember are the times when, seated in the
ingle-nook, he used to listen to his grandmother telling fairy
stories, as she sat at her black oak spinning-wheel, bending low over
the whirling yarn. "Hommybeg"--it was a pet name she had given to
him--"Hommybeg," she would say, "I will tell you of the fairies." And
the story that he liked best to listen to, though it so frightened him
that he would run and hide his face in the folds of the blue Spanish
cloak which Manx women have worn since two ships of the Great Armada
were wrecked upon the island, was the story of how his grandmother,
when a lass, had seen the fairies with her own eyes. That was many
years before.