FICTION.
DENNY OF THE DOORSTEP.f Miss PUBDON is not a novice in fiction: A few years ago she gave us a charming study of Irish rural life in The Folk of Perry Farm. Now she has written the best book about Dublin street arabs since Miss May Laffan's Flitkra, Tatters, and the Counsellor, published nearly forty years ago. But it is perhaps advisable to say at once that Miss Portion is no politician. The condition of the Dublin slums is an old scandal, but Miss Purdon does not mention the Corporation, or charge the owners of slum property with more than negligent choice of their agents. Her " Weat-Enders " are not heartless plutocrats or " profiteers" but they oscillate between indiscriminate almsgiving and a pedantic administration of organized benevolence, with the result that they either foster mendicancy or provoke rebellion against cast-iron routine. Against such people as Dinny's stepmother the gods fight in vain. She could not pawn or sell the boots which were given him by a charitable Society because they were stamped with the Society's badge, so she burned them. Brigeen and Dinny lost their mother when Dinny was a baby, but were rescued from their worthless father by an old basket-woman, Mrs. Molally, who lived in the cellar of a tenement-house which had once been a fine mansion. " Unfathomable is the goodness Dame of IA* boorsiop. .113/ K, le, Ptudon. Main Tee Talbot Fres& of the poor to one another," writes Miss Pardon; and• Mrs. Mollaly is the real heroine of these pages, with Brigeen as a good second. Unhappily for the children, their father marries again and recaptures them to become the serfs of their drunken step. mother, who sends them out to " beg their bit." So begins the record of their doorstep existence ; but you are not to suppose that the nomad life of the young Dorans was wholly unattractive. " It's not dull. There is a chewiness about it that gives it life and colour. Rags and bare feet, and even hunger, are things you get used to. The human frame is adaptable, and seems capable of going without to a marvellous extent." But Dinny was a slow child, slow in mind and body : always " in dread " of something or somebody—of his stepmother, of being late for school, of the " polio-man." " Brigeen and Granny Holally had done their best for him ; but it wasn't what he should have had. The Dinnys of our cities really deserve a lot of credit for managing to live at alL" So when Brigeen got work at the theatre and was then put to school and could no longer mother him, the burden of his backwardness became more than he could bear, and it was a blessing in disguise when he was run over in the street and crippled for life. The hospital was a Paradise ; the Sister an angel of gentleness and goodness. And if poor Dinny's capacity for silent misery was afterwards severely tested in the too well-regulated Home, his flight took him right into the arms of Mrs. Molally. Indeed the story ends in a sort of blissful transformation-scene. The wicked stepmother has disappeared for ever, and the children are removed from want by a miraculous legacy from their father, who before his death in America had, by " Blunderer's Luck," amassed a small fortune in the mines. So it will be seen that Miss Purdon is no ruthless realist ; she is not always plucking at our heartstrings. Even in the earlier stages of the narrative the children enjoy moments of acute delight, as in their wonderful first journey on a tram, their visit to the Zoo, and the Christmas dinner in Mrs. Molally's cellar. Mrs. Molally is a real saint of hospitality, and her con- versation a mine of homely wisdom expressed with the oddest and most picturesque turns of phrase. When her admirable crony, Miss Julia, said that Mrs. Doran was as woes as a briar, Mrs. Molally replied : " That does mostly only be when she'll have a few jolts of whisky taken."
Miss Purdon makes us laugh and cry, and also think. She has no panacea for the slum problem. Her book is not a pamphlet, but a plea for sympathy, for intelligent effort ; and we are sure it is her own prayer that she puts into the mouth of Mrs. Moistly : " The Lord forgive them that has no leniency or softness for the poor, only harishing them out of their little places."
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