, as is likely, the one arrested shall hold his tongue as
to his companion. You do not see the murder on the stage, but you hear
the shot and see McKie return to his home, and you know it was he killed
the landlord. The tension of the last scene is almost unendurable. His
wife's providential lie for McKie, her agony in her knowledge of his
guilt when she sees his face on his return, the man's terror, are
handled with masterly firmness and sureness. To see this scene on the
stage in the hands of actors worthy of it must be to know real tragedy.
In this play, too, brief as is the glimpse we have into these four lives
of small farmer and his wife, his farmhand and his neighbor, a neighbor
of alien race and hated faith, you get to know them as if they were
friends of long standing. Character creation and character presentation
in pithy, tense dialogue are the great gifts of Mr. Mayne. Francey
Moore, the "dark man," with his sensibility, his eloquence, and his
flaming rage, is not of the characteristic men of Mr. Mayne. They are
men of slow ways all un-Celtic and with smouldering hearts like those
of the Northmen we read about in the tales of "Origines Islandicae."

In "Red Turf" (1911) Mr. Mayne turns away from County Down to the Galway
bogs, admirably symbolizing the hot land feud between neighbors in his
title. There are but five characters in the play, Martin Burke, farmer,
and his spitfire of a wife; and his neighbors the Flanagans, father and
son, who have won away from the Burkes, by the surveyor's decision,
their bank of stone turf that had come to Mary Burke from her father;
and an old fellow little better than a beggar. Mary taunts her husband
until he shoots the elder Flanagan as he is working away on the "great
stone bank." It was not his own gun Burke had, but, ironically, it was
one just brought to his house by the poor old man whom they had often
befriended, John Heffernan, brought that it might not be found in his
house by the gauger, and he unable to pay the license. It is not made
clear that there was malevolence in the leaving of the gun at the Burkes
by the old fellow, malevolent as are some of his remarks. Akin to him,
not in his malevolence but in that each is in a way a bit of a prophet,
is the grandfather in "The Turn of the Road," but more nearly akin to
old Granahan is Uncle Bartle of "The Mineral Workers" of Mr. Boyle.
Synge records old men of prophecy and tales in his travel sketches, but
he put no