us to an
entranceway by the side of a produce shop. We knocked on the door and
waited, and waited. We knocked again, and at last heard steps coming
nearer and nearer. The door opened and revealed a young man in
work-a-day black suit and derby, with a candle in one hand and a
property spear in the other. He conducted us down a narrow, drafty
hallway, into a hall in which were wooden benches as rude as those in
the bandstand of a backwoods country fair in the States, and a slightly
raised platform at the farther end. We were soon in eager conversation
with young store clerks and typists and artisans who were about to set
to work at that in which their hearts lay, the interpreting of plays out
of Ireland's heart. It was good talk we listened to from those young men
and women, boys and girls all of them in their fervor and zest and high
aim. Their enthusiasm carried through "Connla," "The Racing Lug," and
"Deirdre" with real impressiveness. Of Mr. Cousins's two plays one was
realistic of the north of Ireland shore life of to-day, and the other,
"Connla," like Mr. Russell's "Deirdre," made out of Ireland's heroic
age.

Of the actors we met that night, but Miss Walker (Maire ni Shiubhlaigh)
was with the Irish Players on their American tour of 1911-12, and even
she has not been continuously with them since 1902. The amateurs had
then but begun, under the direction of Mr. Fay, on the slow fashioning
of themselves into the finished folk-actors they proved themselves in
America. But even this acting, so little removed from that of amateurs
at these rehearsals, had distinction, the distinction of fidelity to
life in "The Racing Lug," the distinction of possession by dream in
"Deirdre"; and let it be remembered, too, that it was a rehearsal
without costume, and that one had to be carried away from the
conventional dress of the Dublin streets, and had to be made to feel
that the characters in "The Racing Lug" were primitive fishermen, and
the people of "Connla" and "Deirdre" the people of Ireland's Homeric
age.

Miss Maire T. Quinn, Mr. T. Dudley Digges, Mr. P.J. Kelly, with Miss
Walker and the brothers Fay,--Mr. W.G. Fay and Mr. Frank J. Fay,--were
then the leading actors of the company. The playwrights, too, took part
in their own or their fellows' plays in the lesser roles, Mr. Russell
sometimes playing the druid in his "Deirdre" and Mr. Colum carrying a
spear or wearing a pea-jacket as need was. One circumstance or another,
p