When the stranger had passed on, Fox, Ferguson and Hyland surrounded the Master.

"Well, Mr. O'Keefe," ventured the choirmaster, who by trade was a shoemaker, "we've had music in our town to-day."

"Correct, Fox," beamed the Master. "Your perception is commendable," whereat Hyland smiled.

"What do you think of him, Bob?" the Master turned to his crony.

"He beats all the fiddlers I ever heard," commented Ferguson.

"Fiddlers, Bob?" gasped the Master. "He's no fiddler, sir. He's a Maestro."

"My word!" said Fox later to Hyland, "it took the Master to name him. A Maestro, mind you?"

"And didn't poor Bob look small?" smiled Hugh. "A fiddler, sir?' says he; he's no fiddler,' as much as to say that Bob might be, and a botch at that."

That evening, by special invitation, the stranger visited the Master in Chapel Lane. Not every one might enter the holy of holies, and whosoever held the open sesame thereto was accounted fortunate in Derreen.

The stranger had his violin in its green bag.

"I am proud and honored to make your acquaintance," said the Master at the door.

The Master's fame and his taste for music had reached the stranger.

"A pleasure, sir, that is heartily reciprocated," he smiled fascinatingly.

"My name is O'Keefe, sir-Richard O'Keefe," said the Master-"Richard O'Keefe from the Kingdom of Kerry."

"Ah! from Kerry?" smiled the other. "I am Bolan-Tom Bolan they call me

on the road, and I hail from Limerick."

"Limerick?" mused the Master reminiscently. "I know it well

There are a few discriminating friends up-stairs who will be delighted to know you."

In the Master's study the wanderer found Fox, Ferguson and Hyland gathered.

"Kindred spirits, Mr. Bolan," smiled the Master, introducing them, "birds of a feather, you know."

Such a night! Fox had his flute and played his prettiest. Hyland made treason fascinating by beautiful words set to beautiful song, despite Ferguson's

presence.

"Don't you know that I could arrest you for such sentiments?" said Ferguson, who was a pensioner of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and "ipso facto" empowered to punish traitors and conspirators against Her Majesty.

"Ah, but you won't, Bob," smiled the Master. "Many a good Irish heart beats under the Queen's uniform.”

This disarmed the pensioner, but Hyland added injudiciously

'Unprized are her sons 'till they've learned to betray," "

While Bolan heaped fuel on the flame by softly singing

"Let Erin remember the days of old
Ere her faithless sons betrayed her.'"

Poor Ferguson was being ruthlessiy baited by his contumacious friends. To have worn England's livery was to them the climax of degeneracy. But there was no malice in their allusions; for the Master, Fox and Hyland knew, in common with all Derreen, how Bob, while yet in active service, had more than once

imperilled his career by befriending men outlawed by the Government and giving them word of impending arrest in time to ensure their escape.

But towards midnight Bolan poured oil on the troubled waters, softened all differences, and won all hearts by sing

ing, with a pathos that was at once personal and a sealing of the eternal friendship of the quintet:

"Farewell! but whenever you welcome the hour

That awakens the night song of mirth in your bower,

Then think on the friend that once welcomed it too

And forgot his own griefs to be happy with

you.

Those griefs may return, not a joy may remain

Of the few that once brightened his pathway of pain;

But he ne'er will forget the soft vision that threw

Its enchantment round him while lingering with you."

Yes, the wanderer had his griefs, bravely hidden from the world and known only to his friends in the stress. of later days.

Next day he disappeared; but after a space of some months, the Master, returning from his school in the afternoon, saw a group about his door and caught the well-remembered adagios of the expert violinist. Not knowing that the Master was at St. Nathy's, pursuing his academical duties, Bolan had gone to serenade him at his home, followed by his admiring auditors. He had been playing some time, unnoticed by O'Keefe's wife or daughters, and was moving away when the Master espied

him.

Now, the Master's prodigality was equalled by his wife's parsimoniousness, which balanced and kept it in check. And, indeed, she needed to keep it in check, for his funds were never plethoric. It required a watchful eye to make ends meet in the scholar's household. Indifferent to dress himself, his daughters were like lilies of the field who, toiling not nor spinning, loved yet to be arrayed in Solomon's glory, while the Master indulged their extravagant fancy

with paternal folly. Beggars knew him. as an indulgent friend, and Derreen had its full complement of beggars. Yet his income was pitifully small. He received it by quarterly instalments, and never a quarter's pay but was sorely needed when it came. He might have made something by private tuition, but the Master's hobby was poor but deserving boys, full of promise, whose parents, could ill afford to pay for classical tuition. Yet it was these boys the Master took in his spare hours, rejecting the sons of the rich. With him it was a labor of love and he gave them gladly of his time.

"If I can but give one priest to the altar of God 'twill more than repay me," was his explanation. And more than one poor lad had he, in the years of his incumbency, helped to the sanctuary from the squalor of hut and hovel. His in the treasury of the Lord the reward that moths consume not.

There was but one pound left in the house and this his wife was jealously guarding. Therefore she gave not to Bolan, in violation of sacred custom.

"Mr. O'Keefe is not yet home," she said from an upper window.

Bolan bowed graciously, lifted his hat in salute and had reached the corner of Chapel Lane, when the Master overtook him.

"A hundred thousand welcomes," smiled the scholar, seizing the musician's hand.

A group of commercial travellers at the door of a neighboring hotel had beckoned to him, and he was moving. towards them.

"One moment," urged the Master, detaining him. "Susanna," he called in the hallway of his home.

His wife appeared.

"Did you give anything to Mr. Bolan?" he asked.

"Oh, Richard," she protested, "how could I give him anything and so little left?"

"How could you, Susanna?" he asked severely. "Have you ever starved yet, since I married you?"

"No," she hesitated.

"Nor shall you, while God spares me my health," said her husband. "In the meantime, Susanna, remember that the Lord loves a cheerful giver. I fear you're not in the latter category, Lord love you!" he smiled. "You have a pound left, I believe?" "Yes, Richard."

"Give it to me, please."

"Oh, Richard, you will beggar us with your ridiculous ideas of generosity," she cried, tears in her eyes.

"Generosity?" laughed the Master. "Not generosity, Susanna, but duty-" "Is it your duty to give to every one that chooses to stop before your door, imposing on your good nature?" "Never mind, Susanna. I will not argue the question with you. You know the corporal works of mercy? Feed the hungry; give drink to the thirsty; clothe the naked; harbor the harborless. Have you done so this day?"

"Charity begins at home," she urged. "Cast your bread upon the waters, Susanna. Remember the sequel. You have deliberately turned a poor wanderer from my door. Please let me have that pound."

The wife yielded to his insistence and placed her last gold piece in his hand. "Here, boy," called the husband, "bring me the change of this."

The boy trotted away to an adjacent shop and returned anon with a handful of silver.

"Here, Bolan," said the Master, pouring half the silver in the musician's hand. "If you're not too busy, I'll be delighted to have you come in to-night.”

Bolan protested against the largess, but it was forced upon him.

"Now, Susanna, said observe," O'Keefe to his weeping wife. "This is how I reward such generosity as yours." And he deliberately flung the remaining silver, coin by coin, with the grace and agility of a boy, high over the opposite wall and far into the Member's garden.

"We're ruined," sobbed Susanna. "Not a penny in the house to buy supper."

"Never mind, Susanna," said the Master, "the Lord will provide. But remember, my dear, that the Lord loves a cheerful giver."

The Lord did provide-through the agency of Matthew, the Member's butler, for that functionary had witnessed the drama of the silver pieces from a rear upper chamber of the Blake mansion; and, some hours after their dispersion, brought a handful of half-crowns and shillings, covered with garden mould, to the anxious Mrs. O'Keefe, while her husband was busy tutoring one of his poor boys in his study up-stairs.

Blooms the rose

June's sweetest psalterWhere the crimson sunlight flows. Filled with love, it longs to rest On the Savior's sacred Altar, There to find the rapture blest.

Like the rose,

Dear, gentle Savior,

May each soul that seeks repose
In Thy Heart a welcome meet.

Though the tempter's wiles allure,
Draw me, Jesus, to thy feet.

A

N Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian," written by himself, is not dull reading, though the author was not in any sense a bright man. Any one who writes the story of his own life with some degree of candor is sure of readers. And when we remember that Colley Cibber was in a position to follow the careers of the leading actors and actresses of the day; that he was personally acquainted with many of the best playwrights of his time; that he was something of an actor and writer himself, and the manager of a famous theatre, it is easy to see that his story must be one of unusual interest. It is: I. A fairly honest attempt at autobiography.

II. A history of the London stage from 1660 to 1731.

III. A collection of memoirs of the more important players and writers of the time.

IV. An intimate history of the attitude of the Government towards the stage during that eventful period.

Of himself, naturally, Cibber has much to say. He tells us of his birth in London on November 6, 1671; of his father, Caius Gabriel Cibber, who came to England some time before the Restoration of Charles II to follow his profession of statuary; and of his mother, the daughter of William Colley of Rutlandshire. It is interesting to read of his experiences in the free school of Grantham in Lincolnshire to which he was sent at the age of ten years. "Such learning as that school gave me is the most I pretend to," he says, "but even there I remember I was the same inconsistent creature I have been ever since. Always in full spirits, in some small

capacity to do right, but in a more frequent alacrity to do wrong, and consequently often under a worse character than I really deserved." It was while at this school that he wrote his oration for the funeral of Charles II and his ode on the accession of James II, which gained a holiday for the school but not the good will of the pupils for the writer. In 1687 Cibber went to London and for a while it was uncertain whether he would devote such talent as he had to the Church, the court, or the army. He tells at length of his passion for the stage, which made all three equally impossible; of his attempts to "suppress the bewitching idea of SO sublime a station," and of his final decision that there "was no joy in any other life than that of an actor." He gives an account of his six months' probation, without pay. "Pay was the least of my concerns," he adds; "the joy and privilege of every day seeing plays for nothing was a sufficient consideration for the best of my services."

Cibber was now well launched in his theatrical career. His first appearance was in the part of the little chaplain in Otway's "Orphan," and so well did he play it that the manager at once increased his salary five shillings. A subsequent impersonation in an emergency, and at the author's request, of Lord Touchwood in "The Double Dealer" advanced him to a pound a week. He lived on this and kept his family while he made his first attempts at play-writing. "Love's Last Shift" was his first work. It was highly praised by Southern and Dorset, but Congreve contented himself by saying that "it had a great many things that were like wit in it."

Cibber's next play was an adaptation of Moliere's "Tartuffe" which he called "The Non-Juror." These dramas and the fact that Cibber was manager of the famous Drury Lane Theatre during what was probably the most interesting period of its existence, account for his prominence in the theatrical history of the early eighteenth century. In 1731, when he was appointed Laureate, he sold out his interest in the theatre, not without some regret, as we glean from the "Apology." In 1742 occurred the quarrel with Pope, and the result was that Cibber, instead of Theobald, became the hero of "The Dunciad." It was at the age of seventy-four that Cibber appeared on the stage for the last time as Pandulph in his own wretched tragedy, "Papal Tyranny."

But it is, after all, as a history of the London stage from 1660 to 1731 that Colley Cibber is read now. In the "Apology" we may find the full history of the King's and the Duke's companies; there we meet Sir William Davenant, the first owner of the Theatre Royal, in Drury Lane, known as the King's, and Henry Killigrew, who was granted a patent for forming the Duke's company that played in Dorset Garden. Now, according to Cibber, there were three reasons for the prosperity of the theatre during this period. One was the fact that playgoing was interdicted interdicted during the Civil War. "What eager appetites from so long a fast must the guests of those times have had to that high and fresh variety of entertainments which Shakespeare had left prepared for them?" asks Cibber. The second reason was that before the Restoration no actresses had ever been seen upon the English stage. The characters of women had been performed up to this time by boys or effeminate looking young men, with what grace and effectiveness we may easily imagine. The third reason was a private rule, or agreement,

which provided that no play. acted at one house should ever be attempted at the other. All the best players, therefore, of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Fletcher and the rest were divided between two great theatrical syndicates. Cibber traces the history of these two playhouses and their owners their careers, singly and jointly, their quarrels and legal squabbles-up to the year 1731, and every chapter is interesting, not on account of the way it is told, but because of the intrinsic value of the bald facts.

As a collection of memoirs of famous players, Colley Cibber's autobiography will always be consulted more or less. Betterton, Monfort, Kynaston, Sandford, Nokes,-Cibber has written them all up from his own point of view, and though his view is singularly circumscribed, still, for want of better, we are glad to read what he has to say. "Betterton was an actor as Shakespeare was an author, both without competitors!" he says. "How Shakespeare wrote,"

he continues, "all men who have a taste for nature may read, and know-but with what higher rapture would he still be read, could they conceive how Betterton played him!" Thus he goes on for eleven or more pages about Betterton. Then are we introduced to the other players of the day, and if we are to believe Cibber, many of them attained astonishing excellence in their special lines. Of Mrs. Barry he says: "In the art of exciting pity she had a power beyond all the actresses I have yet seen or what your imagination can conceive." "Mrs. Leigh," he tells us, "had a very droll way of dressing the pretty foibles of superannuated beauties; and Mrs. Monfort was so good a mimic that she often made an author vain of work that had in itself but little merit." After praising all the leading actors of the time, individually and collectively, Cibber asks, "If in my account of these memorable actors I have not deviated