round; one is paralysed, and all are in wretched condition, and probably envy their frontless counterpart on the gateway. He at least gets plenty of fresh air.

The royal emblem of Ethiopia is the Lion of Juda. One cannot help feeling that the same qualities which have caused the Abyssinians to keep these poor brutes to rot in their cages, and which leave them content with half a lion on their Palace gate, must ere long reduce the proud beast which struts upon their royal seal to like degradation.

The evening fires are lit, and the smell of wood-smoke rises to meet me as I leave the plateau of the market square, and dive down another precipitous alley through lines of wattle-and-daub huts, which in this quarter of the town replace the flat-topped stone houses of Arab construction. This time the sentries at the gate salute me politely, for this being one of the gates I use daily, the guard receive a periodical baksheesh. The day of presentation is at hand, so they are on their best behaviour,

Once more I pick my way

in the gathering dusk across the abomination of desolation beyond the gates, and scrambling across a little stream which runs below the walls, I begin the steep climb towards my house.

The velvety Eastern darkness falls like a cloak. Ghoulish shapes of overfed pariahs slink past me along the hedges. As I reach the level of Saint Mikail's Church, I pause and look back towards the town. It lies below me, a dark mass, picked out with twinkling fairy lights, and all its meanness veiled by the gentle night. The hum of many voices

rises curious sense of human friendliness.

to my ears with

Then, as I bend my steps slowly towards my house through the solitude of the coffee gardens, Harar with all its alien charm slips from me in the darkness. Thoughts of far-off Sundays crowd upon me: the keen air of Norfolk blows in my nostrils; a little white form, with ever-faithful eyes, pads softly at my heels on phantom feet, and Memory takes me by the hand and leads me Home.

L. A.

"ON what do the destinies of empires hang! If, instead of the expedition to Egypt, I had made that of Ireland, . . . what would England have been to day? and the Continent? and the political world? "1 So Napoleon is reported to have said at St Helena. Vision, it must be admitted, came to him somewhat late, When it would have served his own ambition and the French lust for dominion, he was blinded by the glamour of the East. The sunshine of the Orient dazzled him inte dreaming of a new Empire of the East. Through Syria, he declared, he would turn the flank of the armies of Europe. If he had been half as great a sailor as he was a soldier he would have seen then, and not only after all his projects had ended in utter ruin, that it was for his own and France's fortunes ten times better to turn through Ireland the flank of the fleets of England.

The more one reads of modern history, the more one is inclined to think that after all there is something in Oliver Cromwell's belief in "God's Englishman," not perhaps altogether in Oliver's sense, but in the sense that the Englishman seems to be, or at any rate to have been in the past,

specially favoured by Providence. Living on an island, no nation can do him mortal injury so long as he is master of the seas. In maintaining that mastery again and again the winds have been his allies and never his enemies. And he has been even more helped by the want of sea-sense among the nations nearest him who wished to do him mortal injury. Till the late war those nations have mostly been the Spaniards or the French. Neither of these had sufficient seamanship to bring disaster in battle to his power on the seas; but what is more, neither of them was able to perceive how disaster to it might otherwise be brought.

Ireland is the Achilles' heel of English sea-power. She lies between Great Britain and every where. Not & soldier can be sent out to any colony er dependency of the Empire, not a bale of cotton or woel er a ton of wheat or frozen meat can be brought in from the United States, or Australia, or South America save in ships which have to pass her northern or her southern coasts. energetic enemy possessed of these coasts and their innumerable harbours might strangle England as surely as in the late war England strangled Germany. Yet never, save on

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one occasion, has an enemy of England's made any serious attempt to obtain possession of those coasts and harbours. That was not for want of invitations to do so: with a single exception, all England's enemies were, as Mr de Valera recently told an American audience, regarded by Irish patriots as Ireland's friends. The Americans were the one exception to which Mr de Valera thought proper not to refer. During the War of Independence the Irish patriets took violently the side of England, and on the motion of their leader, Henry Flood, raised an army of twenty thousand men, whom Flood called "armed negotiators," to help to crush the rebelsthe first time, I think, since the Revolution of 1688 that Irish Roman Catholics were armed to fight England's enemies. One can hardly blame the "President of the Irish Republie" for failing to dwell upon this point in addressing an American audience, any more than on the fact that it was the relatives of the loyal Protestants of the North who helped to win America her victory.

The Dutch, the Russians, and the Germans were preoluded by their position from accepting these invitations to Ireland's shores. But no such difficulties lay in the way of accepting them so far as Spain and France were concerned. And both of them did accept than once, but never, save on one occasion, in any other way than that which must bring disaster en

them more

those who invited them. Both of them seemed to regard Ireland as merely a sore on the body politic of England, by irritating which they might cause her discomfort, never as a joint in her armour through which a well-directed blow might end her life.

The first English invasion of Ireland took place under the sanction of the Pope, and the first Continental intervention against the English in Ireland was initiated under the same auspices: it is hard to say which was more disastrous to the Irish race. It was Sir James Fitzmaurice, a former and most capable rebel, whe had been previously but perhaps not very prudently pardoned, that sought his Holiness's aid, and the aid secured took the form of a papal legate, a blessed banner, and a few sets of arms. Later, Philip II. of Spain was induced to send some eight hundred soldiers. This intervention ended in the massacre of Philip's soldiers, the destruction of the great house of Desmond, and the devastation of the province of Munster. It is interesting to remember that both Edmund Spenser and Sir Walter Raleigh served throughout these proceedings in the English army, and that the latter superintended the slaughter of the Spaniards.

Later, Philip intervened again. This time it was during the rebellion in Ulster. Never had a man a better chance of striking his enemy a deadly blow, and never did a man deal

such a paltry stroke. The great Earl of Tyrone had eontrived to form a national alliance against the English. Again and again he had defeated them on the field. Army after army had been poured into Ireland, and it was only when he was yielding to superior numbers that Philip sent him help. Fifty ships brought three thousand soldiers to Kinsale Bay; they landed and fortified themselves, and called on Tyrone to join them. Tyrone marched from the North; but when he reached Kinsale the English army was there before him, the Spanish ships had sailed away, and the Spaniards were besieged by gea and land. They called on Tyrone to relieve them. Against his better judgment (for he wished to await the Spanish fleet's return), Tyrone tried to do so and was defeated, Then the Spaniards surrendered, on condition that they were allowed to sail back to Spain.

These were the efforts to free Ireland made by the king who sent the Invincible Armada to conquer England. If he had sent the Armada to Ireland the history of the world might have been changed as completely as Napoleon guessed it would have been had he taken his army to Ireland instead of to Egypt.

When Philip sent his last expedition, Ireland was united as it never was before and has only once been since in her whole history. When Louis XIV. sent his help she was doubly divided. In 1689 the

colonists of the North were in arms to maintain the Protestant religion and the English connection. The people of the South were all in arms to maintain the Catholic religion; but some of them were in arms also to maintain the English connection, while the rest were in arms to break it. King James, who wished to be restored to the throne of Great Britain, naturally sided with the first party, and King Louis, who wished to see Great Britain's power broken, sided with the other party.

With such a division in their objects it is not strange that the Southerners failed before the Ulster colonists at Derry and Enniskillen, and fled before William's army at the Boyne. It was only when James and his friends had abandoned them that they put up a desperate and nearly successful fight for what has always been the real object of Irish Nationalists since there were Irish Nationalists-the independence of Ireland.

80.

France had much the best of the bargain. The reputation of the Irish Brigade in the service of France was very great and very Irish. "Your men, Lord Dillon," said the French king once, "give me more trouble than all the rest of my army." "Your Majesty," replied Lord Dillon calmly, "the enemy say precisely the same thing."

So far all these expeditions were of the same kind-a handful of men and some arms sent to engage English attention, while the government sending them settled matters of much more importance (as they believed) on the Continent. We now come to the one and only real attempt to detach Ireland from the British Empire and make her a place of arms entrenched between Great Britain and the rest of the world. The attempt was the work of one man, and, but for England's old allies, the winds and waves, and the French want of seamanship, it might have proved the most complete calamity she ever did or ever can suffer.

Theobald Wolfe Tone was, like nearly all the distinguished Irishmen of the eighteenth century, a person of no family and small fortune. His grandfather, a tenant and dependant of the Wolfes of Castle Warden-it was through this connection that Theobald received the name of Wolfe-left at his death some little property, which was squandered in a lawsuit between Theobald's father, Peter, and a younger Theobald from his

brother.

earliest youth seems to have been a headstrong and unruly bey; he wished to be a soldier, and resented his father's decision that he should be a lawyer. After being a second in a duel in which his principal's opponent was killed, and running away with a Miss Witherington, whose family held a much higher position than his, wasting a year or two in the Temple, London, and receiving £500 from his wife's grandfather, he was called to the Irish Bar, which he for the rest of his life heartily hated, and altogether neglected.

This does not seem a very promising beginning, but there must have been something partioularly attractive about the young fellow. He quarrelled furiously with his wife's family, but his wife remained passionately devoted to him. He openly derided the law, but the lawyers regarded him with admiration. He was poor and a republican, but the rich and aristocratic cherished him. With all its faults, Irish society in the latter half of the eighteenth century had its virtues: one of these was a ready acceptance by it of ability and character. Wolfe Tone, the impecunious son of a bankrupt coachbuilder, was as a student and 88 a briefless barrister the intimate friend of the Duke of Leinster, the head of the nobility, and of John Hall Wharton, M.P., with his £14,000 a year.

Neglecting the law, in which he had made a very good beginning, Tone took to pamphlet