ing feeling that she was indeed accountable for his exploit. After Brian's hasty warning, however, she ventured upon no excuse, deeming it more advisable to leave all explanation to him; but she blushed, and immediately becoming conscious that Mrs. Hope noticed the fact, blushed the more.

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Won't you both come and rest in the house?" she at last ventured shyly.

Mrs. Hope, whose eyes had turned with devouring anxiety to the young man's face, answered stiffly:

"Thank you.

My son ought to lie down and keep perfectly quiet until the heat of the day is over, if you can let him have a room."

Giovanna led the way towards the little villa with a sinking heart. There was a sort of desperation in the mother's tone, and in the expression of her face, that left no further room for doubt as to the gravity of Brian's condition.

One of the tiny bedrooms was hastily prepared: the green shutters were closed against the brilliant morning sunshine; and Brian threw himself wearily upon the bed. Giovanna lingered a moment by the door, looking at her lover with a wistful entreaty which she could not keep from her eyes.

All the day long Mrs. Hope kept guard over him, while Giovanna must attend to his wants without the satisfaction of ministering to him personally. It appeared to her evident that the poor distraught mother considered her guilty of having schemed to secure Brian's notice and wean his affections and his precious time from her, who had the best right to them. The implied idea caused Giovanna acute suffering, the more so as Brian appeared to have no intention of justifying her. She longed to ask leave to sit with him, but courage failed her when she encountered Mrs. Hope's forbidding gaze, on bringing a glass of milk or a message to the door of the room he occupied.

She secured the services of two men to carry the invalid back to his home in one of the chairs in which tourists, who liked to explore the mountains without too much exertion, were sometimes transported up their rude paths. As evening approached, bringing the hour of her lover's departure, she felt an increasing longing to burst into his room and fiercely defend her right to be with him, but dread of distressing him,

and a certain shrinking from his mother's unjust condemnation, restrained her. Her heart was too sore for tears when she stood at the door to see him off at last, but surely in a look, in a smile, his heart would speak. Her own beat to suffocation; she turned as white as he was himself as he crossed her threshold, but he looked first at his mother who was holding his coat ready for him to put it on. Giovanna's eyes followed his, and read the torturingly jealous anxiety that seemed to be actually withering Mrs. Hope's already lined and faded face as she watched for their mutual farewells. Then before he turned to her Giovanna knew she was to have nothing, not a crumb.

She bit her lip as she extended her hand:

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Good-bye, Mr. Hope," she said, "I trust you will be none the worse for your ill-advised mountain trip."

Then her brave eyes fell, but his barely lingered on them for an instant.

"Good-bye," he said, "and thank you for your hospitality." His cold hand pressed hers; he dropped into the chair; his mother tucked a rug round him, put up an immense parasol to shield him from the setting sun's rays, then turned to take leave of their temporary hostess.

Giovanna forced herself to look up and receive the perfunctory expressions of gratitude with answering civility. Mrs. Hope's triumph was plain as though she voiced it:

"You see he only thinks of me-he cares nothing for you," might have been written on her countenance.

In a few moments the little cortège was lost to sight, and Giovanna, listening to the receding footsteps on the cobblestones, said slowly and dully to herself:

"I shall never see him again."

Three days later, in the sunny hours of the morning, the bell of the English church at Bellagio tolled, and the slow sound rose up the mountainside to Giovanna's little villa, and passed throbbing in at her window.

Down in the garden of the Villa Verde Miss Whyte was breakfasting when the solemn strokes of the bell fell upon her ear. She sprang to her feet, dropping her roll:

"That poor boy!" she muttered to herself, adding with her Irish instinct: "God be merciful to his soul!"

Then, without an instant's pause to take parasol or stick, she turned her face inland and was soon panting on her way up the mountain.

At the end of three hours she arrived, completely exhausted, at the summer Villa, but she had no thought to bestow upon herself. She found Giovanna lying on her bed, staring at the opposite wall and heeding Luigia, who was trying to induce her to eat, no more than if she had been dead, as the well-meaning girl remarked. Miss Whyte pushed the servant from the room. Then she slipped her withered old arm under her niece's head, and pressed her faded cheek, flushed and heated with exertion, against the drawn young face. "My poor little girl!" she said, and Giovanna began at last to sob.

(To be continued.)

T

LITERATURE IN IRISH SCHOOLS

As a

HERE has recently come to us for review a text-book of literature prepared for the Junior Grade English course of the Intermediate Examinations.* magazine devoted to literature, the Irish Monthly has good reason to be interested in such a volume, one which shows on what lines and to what extent literature is being taught and studied in our Irish secondary schools. The fact that the course in question is that prescribed for the Junior Grade gives it a very special importance. Theoretically, the Intermediate System leads a pupil from primary to university education, and ends with the Senior Grade. Practically, for the great bulk of the students, it ends instead with the Junior Grade. Very few, comparatively, continue through the Middle and Senior Grades. The training of the great num

* English: Junior Grade. Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, Ltd. 2s.

ber, so far as liberal and literary studies are concerned, is complete with the Junior Grade, complete with all the completeness it is ever going to have. From this point of view, the programmes of study for the Junior Grade are of more consequence than those for the higher grades.

Of the text-book referred to, little need be said here; the editor's work appears to be for the most part calculated to help and interest the student. Probably it is not the editor but the needs of the case that are responsible for the disproportion existing in places between commentary and text; we noticed the strange spectacle of whole pages of biographical introduction and an array of notes piled up, overwhelmingly, on top of a single fragile lyric of twenty-four lines! However it was the texts themselves, the poems in particular, that chiefly attracted our attention. There are ten poems in all, each by a different author. They include Aytoun's stirring Burial March of Dundee," Tennyson's romantic and highly-finished Morte d'Arthur," Browning's swinging lines" How They Brought the Good News," Byron's "Vision of Belshazzar," Keat's "Robin Hood," and Wordsworth's beautiful lyric on the daffodils matched by Herrick's on the same theme. Three of the poems are by Irishmen : Davis's "Geraldines," Ferguson's "Burial of Aideen," and Mangan's "Kinkora."

Now, we ask ourselves, is this a good selection? Does it provide a good year's course of poetry for an Irish boy or girl in the Junior Grade? The selection has some undoubted and obvious merits; that can be readily admitted; but we must say that in some important respects we should be glad to see it otherwise. To begin with, it seems to us that the course is a short one, that the pupils might with advantage make the acquaintance of a much larger amount of poetry in their year's study. The poems for the most part are of no great length; the ten total less than 870 lines. If they were in a foreign language, in French or Latin, 870 lines would not appear a long course for a Junior Grade year; but seeing that they are in English, in the every day speech of the students, they look quite a scanty and meagre provision. Would not the healthy mental appetite of fifteen years of age. be able for a much more generous allowance?

Again, the poems allotted to Irish writers form but a small proportion of the whole. As we have said, there are three out of ten. But only three. Why not more? Why not turn to more profitable account the fact that the children are Irish? We are not considering the matter here on the higher ground of how the course of literature might very well be made to serve the nobler cause of Patriotism but merely the immediate and primary object of such a course, which is, we take it, to develop and cultivate literary taste, to make the pupils appreciate literature and, if possible, like and enjoy literature. It is evident that poems on Irish subjects will appeal more strongly and immediately to young Irish minds than those with subjects taken from abroad. Cuchulain is more to them than King Arthur; for he is their own. Let Scotch children grow enthusiastic about Dundee; better names to conjure with in Ireland are the gallant Red Hugh O'Donnell and Owen Roe-" our own O'Neill," as Aubrey de Vere calls him in his fine poem. Again, Irish feeling is radically different from English feeling or any other feeling. Poetry is inspired by feeling and is meant to inspire feeling, and poems that are quickened by the thrill and surge of Irish emotion will find their way more readily than any others to the hearts of Irish students. And it cannot be reasonably objected that there is a want of material to draw upon. There is surely an abundance of good Anglo-Irish poetry; there are lyrics in plenty, and what is more to the purpose, there is a fairly considerable number of poems of incident, of ballads and narrative poems, the kind of poems that seem particularly well suited to the taste and the capacity of young people. If these poems were more largely availed of for the Intermediate Junior courses, we believe the interests of literature in Ireland would be better served.

VOL. XLII.-No. 508.

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