t times,
gypsy-hearted though we be; it is a cry that even the city-loving
eighteenth century raised in all the "Mine be a cot" poems, whether of
Pomfret or Pope or any other of the many who followed the same fashion,
and it is a cry that is especially loud in present-day America. But none
of us can feel the call of the land, none of us can desire it with more
intensity than the Irishman of to-day, city-dweller though we find his
kin in America; there is no one class of people anywhere in the world
who want the land as the Irish peasants of to-day want it. Their fathers
and grandfathers saw the fields that they had farmed turned into
pastures for cattle, as the Scotch crofters saw their holdings turned
into deer-parks; the two generations of Irishmen now respectively in old
age and middle age have known what it is to be taxed out of the places
their improvements as tenants made more valuable; and to-day those of
the old folk that are still alive and those of the middle years that are
still in Ireland are getting back to the land, along with the younger
generation that desires it almost as ardently, but were not born upon
it, profiting by legislation that compels landlords to sell to the
Government, which in turn sells to the small proprietors.

The Irish peasant loves his bit of land far more than his language, and
even more, I think, in the bottom of his heart, than he loves his
church, although allegiance to his church is a duty that he puts before
any love. A boreen in bogland is not a lonely place to the Irish
peasant if he have neighbors of long standing. It is the big city that
to him at home seems the lonely place, despite the glamour of its
lights, and its shops, and its ceaseless excitements.

The story of "The Land" is, as I have said, the story of the struggle
between love of land and the _Wanderlust_, with the love of woman as the
decisive factor in the latter's victory. Matt Cosgar is the son of a
peasant farmer, the last of many that the hardness of Murtagh has driven
to America, and he, too, goes in the end, after his father's will is
broken, because the girl of his choice is restless and will not be
content as a farmer's wife. Matt and Ellen, the fit and the strong, go
to America, Cornelius and Sally, the hair-brained and the drudge,
remain. Symbolic this is, of course, of the situation in Ireland to-day,
or at least yesterday, but the characters are strongly individualized
and show no tendency to harde