lve, is always present. The hardness of youth is the theme of "The
Kingdom of the Young," the hardness that came into the heart of a
daughter, when driven into revolt by the older generation. She turns on
her father in the end, determined that she will not be cheated of the
joy of life as was he.

In "The Foleys," another little play of the same year, 1902, a play that
for all its crudity and incompleteness is full of insight into Catholic
Ireland, youth is again the theme, or the intolerance and
self-righteousness of youth. "Eoghan's Wife" (1902) is only a monologue,
only the old story of the woman who finds her home lonely and
depressing because the wrong man is the man of the house. She looks out
over "brown bogs with black water," wondering what is the way of escape
from it all.

"Broken Soil," put on at the Abbey Theatre on December 4, 1903, is the
first play of Mr. Colum with which, in after years, he was in any way
content, but he was not too content with it, rewriting it in 1907 as
"The Fiddler's House," and, I think, in the main improving it.

Mr. Colum, a youth with an appetite for reading as insatiable as his
impulse to write, read not only his Ibsen but his M. Maeterlinck. Back
of "Broken Soil" is Ibsen, back of "The Miracle of the Corn" is M.
Maeterlinck. "The Miracle of the Corn" was put in rehearsal by the Irish
National Theatre Society in 1904, but so far as I know it was never
played by that organization, its first staging I have record of being by
"The Theatre of Ireland" at the Abbey Theatre on May 22, 1908. Here
again is youth a leading theme, the power youth has, if it be wistful
and tender and pleading, to soften the heart of age. It may seem to some
that the girl Aislinn is only a symbol, only the dream of his youth
returned to the farmer Fardorrougha, who has hardened his heart even in
famine time, but whether apparition, or child of the flesh and symbol,
too, Aislinn is the bringer-back to Fardorrougha of the soft heart of
youth.

As the Irishman in America is preferably a city dweller, it may be a
little difficult for his fellow Americans of other ancestry to
understand why the Irishmen at home were so concerned with Mr. Colum's
next play, whose theme, as whose title, is "The Land." The cry for a
home and a bit of land, a cottage around a hearth and around the
cottage a few acres of your own, is a cry that has been heard in all
ages and among all people. It is a cry that we all have cried a