their years, by this love of the sea which he and the
boy have in common. Mrs. Font wishes her daughter to marry Mask, but the
young people are but half in love with each other. Agnes Font cannot
share his visionariness, as her other lover, Commander Lyle, plainly
sees. So the North of Ireland man never gives up hope of winning her.
Mrs. Font vulgarly throws Mask and Agnes together, in her determination
that they shall make a match of it, and as vulgarly tells Lyle the girl
is not for him. Mask cannot but marry Agnes, Mrs. Font thinks, if Agnes
has a large fortune. To secure the fortune and the lord for her
daughter, Mrs. Font determines to get Guy Font out of the way. Her
purpose coincides with her peasant belief that he is a "changeling," and
is really of the sea people. So she goes with him to a sea cave he is
fond of visiting, and only she comes from the cave. She is suspected,
but before the officers come for her, she learns that her crime has
defeated its own end. Mask is driven mad by the loss of his friend and,
seeking to join him by the sea, is overwhelmed and drawn out by the
undertow. As the officers come to arrest her, Mrs. Font hangs herself
from the landing of the great staircase of Font Hill with the rope Guy
used there as a swing.

"The Enchanted Sea" is cruder, colder, more amateurish than the two
other plays of its class, full of the sort of talk that falls from the
lips of a boy of seventeen just awakened to ideals. Its characters act
as openly and as petulantly as children. Mrs. Font, really fine in
conception, is in realization only a typical villain of the cheap
melodrama; and Commander Lyle, of the Royal Navy, a man of thirty, is as
childish in love as a schoolboy whose beloved takes an ice from his
rival at a church festival.

What Mr. Martyn could have done with "A Tale of a Town," had he been
willing to learn when opportunity was his with Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore
and Lady Gregory, is partially shown in the rewriting of the play by Mr.
Moore into "The Bending of the Bough." The motives remain as they were,
and, in essentials, the action is the same, the first act being little
different in the two plays The four other acts, however, Mr. Moore has
almost entirely rewritten, and though everywhere the fundamental
brainwork is Mr. Martyn's, the last acts are finer in the revised
version. Mr. Moore makes far more plausible the girl, Millicent Fell,
for love of whom, and a life of ease, the political