He had dropped his piece of cake and clenched his hands in the grass on either side of him.

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Now I'm going to be very clever and quote one of your beloved lines that generally bore me," cried Giovanna, trying to be gay. "Thou thyself art Heaven and Hell!' I think that's most apt. I know no one who can be happy over nothing at all as you can-or rather over extraordinary things. You often say you're happy because the sunshine is hot, or the mountains are blue."

"Heaven the shadow of unfulfilled desire,'" quoted Brian. "Pretty dismal!" he added.

You can conjure up a vision of your picturesque East," said Giovanna lightly.

"My unfulfilled desire' is nearer than that," he answered.

As they looked at each other then, her eyes suddenly filled with unexpected tears.

(To be continued.)

THE DAWN-SLEEP

Merry to us the morn in summers that were!
Abroad (and dew on the grass at peep o' the day)
Milking the kine on the pastures of Ireland fair,

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With Croidhe O, fill up the mether, and make no delay."

We were up with the break o' day, then, and gay as
the lark.

Heavy the dawn-sleep, now, dreaming terrible things:
For all night long our tears fall down in the dark,
Lamenting the men over-seas in the War of the Kings.

Scarce is a young man left for the mowing of grass:
Or the wholesome reaping of corn, when the noons
are still,

Under the long, white clouds. The shadows will pass Alone up the glen, and over the side of the hill.

Scarce is a young man left for the stacking of turf:

Or the burning of sloak, brown weed on the twilight strand,

Where the rocks take a cry from the wave, and a moan from the surf:

Scarce is a young man left for ploughing the land.

Who shall make known to Them anointed in vainThat have taken the sword for the sickle, and reap their own kind

What the One-Son of God will declare to the tribes of Cain,

When He shall speak out His Heart, and discover His Mind?

Merry to us the morn in summers that were!

But now we slumber, and dream of terrible thingsDarkness, and dark-flaming fires, and the dead mens' stare,

And the cry of souls that pass in the War of the Kings.

Is the wrath of God on all peoples (not thus would I choose)

That there's never a word to give from the whitening lips

When the folk of the fighting-men come craving for

news

But word of destruction of forts and sinking of ships?

God is not German nor English. The earth is the Lord's. He sowed not for burnings; nor planted His garden for staves;

His Breath in the Clay was not breathed for the triumph of swords;

He made not His Image to lie in the young mens'

graves.

ALICE FURLONG.

THE CROWD

S this to be a disguised apology for snobbery, an odi profanum vulgus et arceo; or is it to be a disquisition on the charms of retirement- Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife'? Neither, reader, but only some considerations about a matter which often escapes your notice because it is one of the obvious things of life and meets you every day upon your path—the advantages and disadvantages of being in a crowd. You may perhaps think it a matter of indifference. Well, let us begin by stating the facts of the case and then it may be easier to judge.

The main fact is this, that in certain circumstances a group or assemblage-let us call it a crowd once for all-comes to possess characteristics very different from those of the separate individuals that go to make it up. This has often been spoken of as a collective soul or mind. There is no need to call it that. It is enough for us that in certain circumstances his belonging to a crowd modifies for the time being a man's characteristics; as long as he is really part of that crowd he feels, thinks, acts in a way wholly different from the way in which he would think, act, and feel if left to himself. You say, 'Of course,' and perhaps, What difference does that make?' Well let us look at the thing a little more closely.

The fact itself is surely a matter of general experience. An extreme case of it is the mad passions that sway a mob. For we must not suppose that even the most violent and criminal of mobs is made up wholly of the dregs of humanity. If that were so it would not concern us here, for then the characteristics and the action of the crowd would be merely of a piece with those of the men that composed it. But in point of fact such mobs-history and experience show itare largely made up of ordinarily peaceful and well-living

citizens. "I have often reflected," said Lord Bathurst in 1733, "that though the majority of a society are honest men and would act separately with some humanity, yet, conjunctively, they are hard-hearted villains." It was to be the case, some sixty years later, of many a respectable bourgeois who so cheerfully voted the heads off the "Aristos during the French Revolution. The mob, however, is, after all, an extreme case. There is no lack of other examples. What schoolmaster does not know the respectful nicelymannered boy who, in a certain set, is transformed into a little demon: the power of evil company is part of the influence of the crowd. Again the audience, congregation, assembly-as the case may be swayed by a powerful orator feels as one man, and what a different man from the units that compose it! It is goaded into rage or melted into tears, swept with gusts of passion, at the whim of eloquence. That powerful force we set such store by, public opinion, is often not the outcome of the collective wisdom of the many but the momentary mind of the crowd, coming, no one knows whence, and passing away in an instant like a breeze over the cornfields.

But what is a crowd in the sense in which we are using the word at present? For there are many kinds of crowds from the maddest of mobs to the gravest of deliberative assemblies. We may set aside at once, as concerning us but little here, the purely accidental concourse, the mere chance throng of men that happen to be in the same place but have no common reason for being there or at least no reason that in any way unites them. Individuals may be influenced by such a crowd, but only in a way so slight as to be negligible. What we are concerned with is both the group, not necessarily met in one place but united by a common purpose, ideal, or emotion, and the assemblage that has come together in order to be stimulated or inspired by some appeal to its mind or its emotions. Here we have the crowd thinking, feeling, perhaps acting, as a crowd, or at least ready to do so when its thoughts or its emotions have been wrought upon. One moment you have merely Mrs. O'Brien and Mr. Smith. Tom, Dick, or Harry, grocer, lawyer, chauffeur, or walking gentlemen'-so many independent units-the next you

have a mass that melts with pity or roars with passion, as one man swayed by a single emotion.

What is it that happens to bring this about? Influences are at work that may perhaps be roughly summed up asa new sense of power; contagion; suggestibility. This power is not a personal, individual power, it is the power of the mass of which the individual feels himself a part. This sense of the power, the force, of the mass allows the individual to yield to instincts which, if alone, he would have held in check. He feels himself carried along and he lets himself go. Next there is contagion, that strange and unexplained phenomenon whereby an emotion "catches on." We know with what lightning-like rapidity consternation spreads from face to face and thence from mind to mind. In the twinkling of an eye a tranquil and sedate audience is transformed into a panic-stricken herd of fighting, struggling, humanity. And, sometimes, no man can tell why! When men are closely united in some emotion or even closely crowded in some space, every feeling, every action tends to become contagious. Men weep that never wept before, or boil with rage against somebody whom they respected but yesterday. The strongest of all crowd-influences is suggestibility. We are quite familiar nowadays with the phenomena of hypnotism, whereby under the influence of a hypnotiser the medium temporarily loses control of his own faculties and becomes a slave to the suggestion of another's will. Something of this sort undoubtedly happens in the case of the crowd. Individuality is temporarily suspended, and the individual is swayed this way and that by emotions that come from without, and, unless he violently resist, he may be hurried into deeds from which in his sober moments his whole nature would shrink.

This influence of the many upon the one may grow even stronger, given certain circumstances in which it often acts. The first is when a gathering is shut up within the walls of a building or closely crowded in the open air within view and earshot of the man that is swaying it. To put it briefly, local unity breeds a kind of psychic unity.

Again the mem

bers of the crowd may have a common purpose in being present, the common consciousness of which binds them into