sponsibilities either of a father or of a husband. Mrs. John assures the mother to be, that if the child is given to the Johns it shall be cared for like a prince. The child is born in a garret, and given over to Mrs. John, who promptly writes to her husband that she has borne him a child. Later the real mother seeks to recover the child, and Mrs. John uses both force and fraud to retain it. The true mother becomes troublesome and Bruno brutally murders her. An investigation is made. Mrs. John is convicted of fraud in connection with the child but protests her innocence of any complicity in the murder. And she destroys herself for grief and shame. It is a somber tragedy of attics and dark alleys, the rat-frequented portion of the world, powerfully expressing, however, the capacity for sin of a woman under the domination of the maternal instinct.

In contrast to this we may set the powerful French play Madame X, by Alexander Bisson, which illustrates the power of maternal love surviving in the midst of degradation and shame. Madame Floriot has deserted her husband and child. In a few years. her lover dies and she returns to her husband but he drives her out of the house, refusing to let her even look at her son. For twenty years she rolls in the mire, and from bad to worse. Youth and beauty are gone. She drowns her sorrows in absinthe and in ether, and lives a wretched life with one man after another. One day she returns from Buenos Ayres to Bordeaux, in company with an adventurer named Leroque, a particularly despicable fellow. Leroque

meets with some of his former associates, and a plot is formed by which they hope to get possession of Madame Floriot's dower of 125,000 francs. This, under the French law, she had a right to claim, but she has left it with her husband and has endured twenty years of misery and privation in order that the money may revert to her son. Leroque, learning the situation, prepares to start for Paris, deaf alike to the entreaties and the commands of Madame Floriot, To thwart him, she shoots him, and quietly gives herself into custody.

In the trial her defense is assigned to her young son Raymond, now grown to manhood. While in prison she preserves an absolute silence, lest the revelation of her identity should bring disgrace upon her son. It is only in the court room that she discovers that the attorney for the defense is her son. Her great emotion at the discovery so moves the young man that his eloquence stirs the jury and she is acquitted. But absinthe, ether and misery have done their work. A few minutes after the trial, and just when Raymond has come to realize that it is his mother whom he has defended, she expires.

A play by an American author, Edwin Milton Royle, entitled The Squaw Man well deserves mention here. A young Englishman, generous to a fault, has settled in the cow-boy country. Here a little Indian princess falls in love with him. And after she has twice saved his life, once at imminent peril of her own, he marries her, although by so doing he loses caste with the white men who despise the "Squaw man"

or husband of a squaw. The Englishman and his squaw have a little boy who has reached the age of four or five years when news comes from England that the father is heir to a noble title, and that the woman for whose love he left England is now a widow still young and beautiful, and waiting for him. He refuses to budge. He would not desert even a dog that had been so faithful to him as has his Indian wife. But he is finally persuaded to send his son to England to be educated for the high position that awaits him. The little squaw, however, cannot consent to be separated from her child, and kills herself when it is taken from her.

The Irish playwrights, whose work has recently delighted large audiences throughout the English-speaking world, have given us at least two plays centered upon motherhood: The Riders to the Sea by John M. Synge, and The Gaol Gate by Lady Gregory. Both are profoundly touching, largely because of the extraordinary beauty of the lines, which are like prose lyrics inspired by passionate feeling. The Riders to the Sea resembles some of Ibsen's work, especially Rosmersholm in the supernatural background, and various plays of Ibsen in the degree to which the dialogue reveals the past even while it carries the story to its end. A mother of the Arran Islands, on the west coast of Ireland, has lost her sons by shipwreck, one after another, until now Bartley, the last, is about to embark even while a storm is threatening and when supernatural omens of disaster are manifest. Bartley is deaf to prayer and entreaty and suffers the fate

of his brothers. When he is brought home on a stretcher the keening of the mother rises to a solemn chant of magnificent power. In poetic beauty there has been no such play in our language since the great plays of Shakespeare. The almost bald simplicity of the plot is redeemed by numerous little touches that reveal the author's peculiar intimacy with the life of the Arran Islanders. Alike on the stage and in the closet the illusion of reality is powerfully sustained by this moving masterpiece. Especially brilliant, subtle and original is the note of triumph and consolation that blends with the mother's chant of sorrow. Even the present sorrow is less painful to her than the eternal fear and suspense which have been well nigh her whole portion as a mother of sea-faring sons. This is not unmaternal; and it is wonderfully human.

Lady Gregory's The Gaol Gate is a very short play. Two old women, one of them the mother, come to the jail before dawn, to hear the last words of a young man who is involved in a murder case. They have heard that he has informed against his associates. But after long waiting they hear that the young man is already dead, and has betrayed nobody. The peculiar horror in which the Irish peasants hold one who turns king's evidence is the underlying sentiment of the play. And the aged mother's keening is as a song of triumph that her son did not betray his associates. It has been my privilege to hear Lady Gregory herself read from this play, whose literary beauty she especially knows how to bring out.

Ibsen's Ghosts is a powerful play expressing not

only the dire effects of heredity, but also the long and terrible misery of a woman who lives with a dissipated husband, to find in the end that the life of her son is ruined by the dissipation of the father. Maternity by Brieux is a protest against the efforts of the French government to increase the population; a plea that motherhood is always sacred even when it is the result of crime; and a protest against a French law forbidding legal inquiry into the paternity of an illegitimate child. Adequately to discuss the propositions inculcated by this play would require a long space. The play contains much that is stimulating and thought-provoking, and exhibits considerable dramaturgic skill.

Of course, these examples do not exhaust the subject of the mother in drama. Yet it is true that plays specially illustrative of motherhood are singularly, and indeed unaccountably, scarce. And the field is nearly virgin soil for those who venture into it.

THE HAPPY HOUR

BY MARY FRANCES BUTTS

The busy day is over,

The household work is done;
The cares that fret the morning

Have faded with the sun;

And in the tender twilight,
I sit in happy rest,

With my precious rosy baby
Asleep upon my breast.