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car go beyond the possibility of overtaking it, so that his best course was to make as swiftly as he could for Barnadrum. Thither, then, he started immediately, in a flurry of anger and alarm. He deemed it contrary enough that his run across country, furzy, boggy, heathery, should be checked as he descended to the ford of a little mountain-stream by the call to stop and help old Judy Flynn, who had dropped her stick, and upset her basket at the stepping-stones. The delay, however, had compensations, for Judy's odds and ends comprised a newspaper packet of oatmeal, which, she told him, had just been given to her by "Herself up at your Own place"; and as in answer to inquiries she reported that her benefactress "looked not too bad entirely, barring the rheumatics," Murtagh resumed his trot in a more tranquil mood.

III.

Old Mrs. Gilligan declared that she would never be the better of the turn she got when she saw him come pelting round the house-corner, and she sitting at the door; but so to declare was, of course, merely a well-recognized convention, and in no way disguised her radiant joy. Not until its first dazzling flare had faded did any grievances emerge into view. Then it struck Murtagh that his mother had become more bent and shrunken during the weeks of his absence, and that she was wearing a very ragged old apron. Looking round the kitchen, too, he noticed sundry small alterations, which he was sure had not been made with her good will; she would never, for instance, let them hang their boots from the rafters, and now a couple of pairs dangled overhead. His guess that the cloak had been a forced loan came near the truth, for a sudden shower just at starting had caused Lizzie in an access of concern

about her flowery bonnet to snatch up the handiest wrap, ignoring a clamor of shrill remonstrance from its owner, and to hurry off in it, little recking what peril she would thus bring upon a darling scheme.

But Mrs. Gilligan did not dwell long on this outrage. Her mind was evidently preoccupied by graver troubles connected with "That One," as she now called her daughter-in-law. These were apprehensions so serious that she could allude to them only in furtive whispers, amid uneasy glances, and she did not get beyond mysterious generalities such as "There's some folks do be sayin' more than their prayers," until she had drawn him into the little inner room, where her queer box of a bed was niched across a slanting corner. She then spoke more freely. "Ah Murt, avic, it's annoyed they have me this while back. What they do be conthrivin' in their minds I dunno rightly, but up to some bad job they are, as sure as the smoke's risin' on the hearth."

"Who are?" said Murtagh.

"Ah, sure, 'tis That One puts the notions into poor Christy's head; the poor lad 'ud never be thinkin' of the like himself. But the talk they have about quittin' out of it, and gettin' over to the States, and all manner, 'ud make your heart sick. And givin' abuse to the good little bit of land, and your poor father's dacint house, rael outrageous. And never done they are colloguin' wid Joe McSharry."

"What at all have they to say to him?" Murtagh said, unpleasantly surprised at the name, which he knew as belonging to one among several gobetweens, who took part in preliminary negotiations about the acquirement of land by their expansive grazier neighbor. Already the Gilligans' holding had been encroached upon by the enlargement of his borders.

"Troth that's more than I can be

tellin' you," Mrs. Gilligan replied dejectedly, "but it's the great discoorsin' entirely they do be havin'. "Twas only last Sunday evenin' he was here the best part of an hour, and the three of them sittin' lookin' at me as if I had seven heads, till I quit out of the room, and left them to their own secrees. Cautious enough they were over it, whatever it was. Just the sound of McSharry's big coarse voice I could hear, and sorra a word plain out of one of them, except that he would be lookin' in again the first day he was able-and the back of me hand to him. But heart scalded I am frettin', Murt alanna, and wonderin' in me mind what might be happenin' wid you away out of it, and ne'er a sowl I could spake raison to. And That One able to persuade poor Christy to any villiny she might take a notion to be after; that I well know. Be the same token, the two of them should be home again now directly. The Wogans' twelve o'clock cock was after crowin' a while ago down below."

"I hear somethin', this minyit," said Murtagh.

But the steps were not Christy's and Lizzie's. It was Joe McSharry himself who presently walked into the house, “without with your leave or by your leave, as if the whole place belonged to him," commented Mrs. Gilligan's wrathful whisper. Yet when Murtagh seemed to be starting up she added: "Ah, stop where you are!" The recollection of his ridiculously premature return checked him into compliance.

Joe McSharry stumped aimlessly about the room for a minute or two, and then went suddenly to the door. "They're comin'," Mrs. Gilligan whispered again, and in fact the voices of Christy and Lizzie and their visitor rose greeting one another at a diminishing distance.

"Well, Mrs. Gilligan, ma'am, you see

I'm here before yous, and after makin' free to step inside."

"Och to be sure, Mr. McSharry, and why wouldn't you? Glad I'll be meself to step in from under the blazin' sun. Grand weather we're gettin'; thank God, but you might as well be walkin' wid a sod off the hearth on top of your head. And th'ould cloak's a surprisin' weight."

"Bedad now, McSharry, you were the wise man, that was contint, widout disthroyin' yourself this day thrampin' over the counthry to save your sowl."

"Wasn't I savin' it in shoe leather, so to spake? And yourself very like to be doin' the same, if you hadn't the wife to take you along, aye faix, and halve the road."

"Halve it the other way round, musha moyah!"

"Fut further I'll not set till I rest me bones a bit," said Lizzie, plumping down on the seat in the little porch; "sit you down, Mr. McSharry, there does be a cooler breath in it here than widin the house."

Murtagh, meanwhile, had stolen swiftly out of the inner room, and with gestures meant to reassure his mother, had slipped behind the highbacked settle, which occupied its summier position at right angles to the front door. The opportunity of overhearing this conversation seemed to demand seizing.

"I just only looked in for a minyit and a half passin' by," said Joe McSharry; "I'm due over at Randalstown agin two o'clock. But I want to know if you're satisfied to be disposin' of your interest in this place on Lawson's terms. I'm apt to see him over yonder. He' about goin' back to England next week."

"We are so," said Lizzie promptly. "on the understandin' that there's no delayin' in the matter. It's the price paid down, and ourselves able to be quittin' very directly, that 'ud suit us."

"And Lawson, too, belike," said McSharry, "so we're all suited."

Then both he and Lizzie looked towards Christy; but Christy held down his head, and kept silence. "What does be botherin' me," he said at last, without raising his eyes, "is Herself within there?""

"Why, has she anythin' to say to it?" said McSharry. "I understood not." "Sorra a bit has she," said Lizzie.

""Tis what's to become of her," said Christy. "Out of Barnadrum she won't stir, that's sartin."

"Wasn't I tellin' you," said Lizzie, "times and agin that the little house back of Nicholas Byrne's is lyin' empty since ould Peggy Hanlon died in it? His riverence says they let her have it for nothin' be raison of the roof bein' scarce worth darnin'; and what was good enough for one ould woman might do for another. She could take her own bed wid her, and maybe a few sticks of the furniture. she'd have a right to be gettin' relief, more betoken"

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"Is it me mother to be goin' on the rates?" Christy interrupted, starting up furiously. "I'd sooner see the pack of yous swimmin' like flies in the lake of destruction, let me tell you."

"What talk was there of any such thing, man alive?" said Lizzie, wheeling away from her own indiscretion. "Sure we can give her plinty to get along wid out of the thrifle we'll have in hand, and lashins more once we're settled in New York. I only passed the remark supposin' be any odd chance she might want a thrifle between our goin' and Murt comin' home to her.... Is it risin' objections you'd be, you omadhawn, and delayin' till the young chap lands in on the top of us and ruinates everything?" she added in a crushing aside to Christy.

Joe McSharry pricked up his ears. "Is your brother Murt apt to be mak

in' any bones about it?" he inquired. "I thought that was all right.”

"It's as right as raison," Lizzie averred. "Sure what at all could poor Murt do to annoy anybody, if he come back, and found us quit, and the roof whipped off, the way Lawson would, if he'd be said by me, as soon as we're out of it. There isn't a quieter boy in the Kingdom of Connaught than poor Murt, or a bigger fool, unless maybe Himself here. Besides, truth to say, it's my belief there's little or no likelihood of him to be showin' his face in this place agin. He'd scarce find his way if he thried; he hasn't that much wit. Stoppin' where he is he'll be, you may depind."

"Sure then we'll manage it aisy." said Joe McSharry, "so long as he isn't givin' any throuble"

"Divil a bit will I," said Murt, suddenly thrusting his head through the kitchen doorway, "except throublin' you to be off out o' this, and lave interferin' wid other people's property." He put his hands on the back of the settle, and vaulted over it, alighting with a prance in front of the astonished three.

"May the saints have me sowl, but it's Himself," said Christy; "glory be to God, Murt, it's glad I am to set eyes on you this day." Christy spoke quite sincerely, for his spirit was indeed sorely vexed by the plot into which he had been drawn, lacking the backbone to resist it unsupported.

In the manner of Murtagh's abrupt entrance Joe McSharry had a sufficient pretext for laughing loud and long, and he did so heartily enough, caring in fact very little one way or the other about a matter from which in no case could any large gains

accrue.

The only member of the party seriously disconcerted by Murtagh's reappearance was his sister-in-law, about whose ears a fabric long and craftily

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elaborated had been shattered into ruin. She, nevertheless, exclaimed, with really admirable presence of mind, that "Poor Mrs. Gilligan would be frighted out of her sivin sinses, the crathur, if Murt come in on her suddint"; and she hurried off the disastrous scene, ostensibly for the purpose of breaking the news gently to her mother-in-law. Already her active brain was busy with the possibilities of some other plan for emigrating from Barnadrum, with less spoil, no doubt, yet not altogether empty-handed.

That evening Murtagh meditatively watched the sun descend into the sea. He had a presentiment that his mother and himself would soon be left to keep house alone, a prospect which he viewed with a light and a heavy heart. His frustration, only just in time, of that domestic conspiracy, while it increased his self-reliance, had sadly The Independent Review.

shaken his trust in almost everybody else. Three weeks' sojourn in strange lands had, in spite of himself, relaxed his rigid orthodoxy on a point or two. The rushy corner of their field might, he thought, be drained after a fashion which he had observed on a farm "away down beyant," and which, even to his prejudiced eyes, had seemingly "some sinse and raison in it." As for his neighbors' opinion, that had lost several degrees of importance. "They may be talkin'," he reflected, "and talkin' after that agin. But sure what I do be thinkin' in me own mind about me own business is more consequence to meself than all the talk they have among the whole of thim." A view of the situation which contained so many fruitful germs that it may have been well worth Murtagh's while to travel for it.

Jane Barlow.

THE CHINAMAN IN BRITISH COLUMBIA.

It is almost impossible in British Columbia to get an unbiassed opinion concerning Chinese labor. Not that any man or woman is without an opinion, or is indifferent to an opportunity for its expression; but every man's pocket is touched, every woman's personal comfort. It is scarcely too much to say that the daily life of every British Columbian (one must be careful not to call him a Canadian) has been changed more or less by the recent legislation of the Dominion Parliament hindering the admission of the Chinese into the Colony.

Hitherto throughout the Province the unskilled or partially skilled, or (as one might perhaps with greater truth say) the unattractive employments have been in yellow hands. Chinamen have been domestic servants, laundry

men, agricultural laborers, market-gardeners and greengrocers, tailors, miners (often on workings abandoned by the white men), and with the exception of a few Indians all the labor in the salmon canneries is Chinese or Japanese. There are no white men or women wanting these jobs, or even willing to perform them, now that Chinese have become scarce. Therefore in so far as Chinamen have given them up, the work is left undone.

But in British Columbia, and among the fifty-two thousand people who live in Vancouver, its largest city, there are still thousands of Chinamen who follow all these callings; earning, every man among them, a living sufficient for his needs, and saving, though he earns but a pittance, money enough to take him home to China, where he hopes to die,

and where he surely will one day lie buried.

The Chinaman is but a temporary worker; he is not a colonist. In the white man's land, of Chinese parentage there are born a few children who play on the pavement in the Chinese quarter of the city, or blink at the white man from a verandah beneath the sign of a laundry or an eating-house. But they are few; the Chinaman does not take his women with him when he emigrates. His work is in the foreign land; his life is over-seas in his own country; and the permanence of him is not that of an individual, but of a stream of individuals setting from Chinese to Canadian shores.

The whole question is beset with paradoxes, and here is the first one. We constantly talk of the cost of raising our children to working estate, balancing (as it seems to us very properly) what a child costs before he can earn anything against the value of what he earns during his working years, and reckoning every man to be worth just so much as he produces over and above what he consumes. If production be used in its largest sense, the calculation seems fair enough. Certainly no nation can become rich if a too great proportion of its members are consumers and not producers.

Now all these immigrant Chinamen have been bred up to the point of workable value at the expense of their own country, not of Canada. That is precisely one of the charges made against them. It is (from one point of view) as though we should grumble at a neighbor who kept all our colts for three or four years, and then turned them over to us to work in the shafts till they were worn out. The matter is not so simple as this, of course; but that is one aspect of it.

The Chinaman, we are further told, lives too frugally; he does not consume enough in the land of his adoption.

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His wages may be low or high, but always he lives on less than his employers choose or are constrained to pay him, always he sends money home to his family or to his creditors. To hear the Chinaman's enemies talk one might suppose that the value of a man lay in his expenditure rather than in his output, and that the more of other men's work we could waste or destroy for our own personal purposes the better citizens we ought to be reckoned. But the very same persons who rail at the Chinaman for spending too little, rail in the next breath, and with better reason, against our idle rich for spending too much. Illogical in any country, it is least pardonable in the new lands, where, conditions being simpler, it is so easy to see that every worker is worth more than his keep, and that his day's wage bears mostly no relation to the value of what he produces for or in the land where his work is done. All our colonies are crying aloud for immigrants; and the growing wealth of the colonies is partly due to the fact that they get their workers ready made. and we in the old lands have to make ours, which is a difficult and a costly business. This is not meant as a plea for Chinese immigration, only it is as well to remember that things are not always wrong for the reasons that they are alleged to be so.

Since all but a few Chinamen go home to die when their life's work is done, it has always been necessary to pour in a stream of fresh Chinamen to keep up the supply. One man went and another came, and to European eyes the two were so much alike that the change made little difference. It is this stream that has been cut off. A Chinaman who is in British Columbia may stay there, but once gone he may not come back unless he pays like a newcomer the head tax of £104 ($500) that is levied on every Chinaman who lands. We should rather say that it

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