Children of the Hills. By Dermot O'Byrne. (Mannsel and Co.
2s. 6d. net.)—Seeking, after the manner of reviewers, to criticize a publisher's declared estimation of his own wares, we were confronted with the statement that " the short story, like the short play, is a form of literature which seems peculiarly adapted to the genius of Irish writers and to Irish subjects." This is perfectly true; at all events, we cannot conceive that the seven short stories which constitute Mr. O'Byrne's book would be interesting in a tongue other than Irish. There is a lack of dramatic situation, and a dependence for their effect upon atmosphere and the apt use of words, which are cons. pensated by the power of the Irish imagination to make poetry of the most prosaic events. "Then he began to beat uninter- mittently and with petulance upon the door, the whiles cursing the inmates for dolts and laggards. From this he fell to kicks, but the pampooties were softened with much bog-water, and his sore toes did not take kindly to the hard oak of the door nor to the nails that studded it. He butted at it with thin knees like twisted roots, while the thorn stick played like the hail of a mid-winter night." This imagination is never far off, whether the story be of Elizabethan times, or of the day before yesterday, or of the blending and mingling of past and present, as in the strange little tale of the "Lifting of the Veil." For ourselves, we find Mr. O'Byrne happiest when he refrains his soul from the terrors of the early persecutions of Ireland, or the coarser horror of the death of Macba Gold-Hair, and plays with humour and delight the tune of a vagabond's life.
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