he ought to have been a soldier. Splendid ! There were two or three men in the courtyard, and one of them made as if he would have attacked us, and then drew back. So we reached the gate. "I was wondering if we should take prisoner the Mandarin. But, even at that moment, he was very clever. Just as we were passing through the gate he suddenly dropped down, and caught Linthorpe's leg as he did so. Linthorpe stumbled forward, and I half fell over him. The next moment Li Ting-Fang, yelling something in Chinese, had rolled on one side, picked himself up in a very quick manner for one so fat, and was behind a pillar even before I shot at him. A shot followed from behind, and a bullet whistled past us. "Run!' cried Linthorpe. Ah, and we did run. I laugh now as I think of the missionary drawing up his loose robe above his bare knees. It was very funnee! They fired-yesbut they were bad marksmen, those Chinese, and, except for a little scratch on my side, they did not hit. So we came out safely. Splendid ! "Afterwards, when Miss Linthorpe gave us a good breakfast, her brother told me the story. Oh, he was a very clever man, this missionary priest. It was due to Chang-Yung that he had discovered where I was. Chang-Yung had seen me in the corridor. He had also guessed what was to happen to me in the morning there had been some nasty orders given-ugh! It makes me shiver even now. He knew I was the friend of Mr Linthorpe. Also that I had rescued his sister, to whom he was much devoted. So he climbed the wall of the compound, and hurried to Mr Linthorpe. The missionary immediately went to the station to telegraph for assistance, but found the instruments would not work, and also found the two engineers very drunk. It was then he took their revolvers, for a plan was coming into his mind. He knew I must be rescued early-or-" And Captain Ivan Koravitch shrugged his shoulders, and gave an expressive sound with his lips. "But it was Nora Linthorpe who thought out the clever scheme. She collected curiosities to take back to England, and had a fine Chinese costume. Also she possessed the big visiting-card of Wuyao-chan, the governor of the province-the English consul had presented it to her for her collection, and her brother knew a leetle Chinese. So he wrote the letter to me, and made up the parcel for ChangYung to put through my window, hoping that the luck of being able to open my door would come to me. Then he dressed himself in the Chinese dress, and with Chang-Yung's help, who had returned, painted with a brush in Chinese characters a short letter demanding a private interview of import ance. Pouf ! Li Ting Fang? Oh, he escaped. When another. The captain lighted a fresh "Did I not once have the pleasure of receiving you at my insignificant abode ?' 66 6 'Yes,' I replied, as I looked him hard in the face, and I fear my departure from your honourable presence was very abrupt.' THE BUBBLE OF GAELIC. BY PERISCOPE. "Like a bubble blown up in the air By sporting children's breath, Who chase it everywhere And strive who can most motion it bequeath: And though it sometime seem of its own might, That only is because it is so light. But in that pomp it doth not long appear; THE Irish Free State poses as bilingual. The make-believe is enshrined in its Constitution, and now the Gaelic fanatics are filled with the hope that some day the traveller who lands on its shores may find a people as ignorant of his language as he of theirs. To foster this delusion the names of the ports where he is likely to land have been already changed, and this baptismal process, which till yesterday affected only the names of Dublin's streets, is now, at the volition of each local tribe (Rural or Urban Council is the more modern name), overspreading the whole countryside with a riot of unpronounceable syllables. The latest Railway Bill will add to the bewilderment, for it provides for the printing of railway tickets and notices in Irish and English, and soon the whole population will be composed of one class-translators and interpreters, -- the -W. DRUMMOND. sound of whose babel will reach unto the heavens. This determined effort to revivify the language was begun by the Gaelic League thirty years ago, and the League has captured the Free State Government, or rather has coerced it, by reason of the prestige which it acquired in recent years. From its birth the League had in itself the germ of the separatist idea. Of its development in that direction it is unnecessary to speak. Will its development in the sphere of language be equally effective, equally remorseless, in its working out! To answer this question one must investigate historically this problem of the resuscitation of a dying language. The Gaelic League has always argued that nineteenth-century Europe yields historical proof that it can achieve its object. It is therefore of philological interest to examine the argument. The first example which is cited is the successful efforts to the Gaelic League before the sinister developments in Czecho-Slovakia in the year 1924 lent a moral to the tale. in of the Croats and Slovenes to resist the imposition of the Magyar language. All through the nineteenth century the struggle between these nationalities went on. Magyar, spoken by the ruling aristocrats, had been made the language of State and law. The Slovenes, thus ousted from all chance of securing any part in public administration, saw their whole nationality likely to be under mined within two generations. The Slovak tongue was gradually reduced to a peasant dialect. In the year 1879 Magyar was made compulsory schools, and only those who had a thorough knowledge of it were allowed to be teachers. Having thus ceased to be a political force, the Slovenes began to foster a literary movement, destined to rescue the language from illiteracy and their children from alien teaching. In consequence, despite the severity with which the Education Act was enforced, the members of the population who knew no Magyar fell only from 47 per cent to 44 per cent in the ten years 1870-80, and subsequent decades saw little change. Then came the Great War; the Czecho-Slovaks have secured their political independence, and to-day they in their turn are engaged in the same operation of endeavouring to suppress the language of the new minority in their State. Such is the first exemplar of the Free State; but the comparison occurred was Secondly, the world asked to compare the language struggle of the Gael with that of the Poles against the Russian tongue-a struggle in which the chief resisting factor was the Polish literary revival. Here, too, the schools were the point of attack until the boycott of the compulsory Russian schools by the children themselves forced Russia in the year 1906 to legalise Polish schools. The Russian and German minorities in the Polish State are likely to find their masters no whit less set to nationalise their tongue. Finland is the next point of comparison. Here Russia had embarked on the same course as in Poland in violation of the Finnish Constitution, which made the Czar not the autocrat but the constitutional monarch of Finland. In the year 1912 the danger point was reached when a Commission on which no Finn sat advised the transfer to the Russian Government of all powers of legislation in regard to language and education. But the Great War frustrated this scheme, which had no foundation either in justice or commonsense. The struggle in Belgium between the French - speaking Walloons and the Flemings may be taken as the final parallel of what a literary revival can effect. The Gallicising of Belgium seemed inevitable as any Gaelic enthusiast who in 1830 when, on the declaration of Belgian independence, French became the only official language. At the time, the Flemings were not in the least distressed at this outlook, and it was only when the literary cult of the Flemish tongue made the people understand the risk of extinction which it ran that the language movement deviated into political channels, where it remains even to-day. Now, in actual fact, is there any real parallel between the Gaelic revival movement and the language struggle in any of these countries ? It has been so long assumed that the parallel exists, and the correctness of the assumption is so vital to the hopes of the Gael, that it is necessary to investigate the facts further, and even a cursory examination shows the nakedness of the land. On The situation in each of these countries differed in all its fundamentals from that in Ireland in the last thirty years. In Slovakia half the population knew Slovene as their only language, and the proportion of native speakers was higher in Finland and Poland. the other hand, in Ireland the census figures for 1901 showed less than 21,000 persons (that is, 1 out of 200) who spoke Irish as their only language, and 620,000 who were bilingual. The figures for 1911 were less than 17,000 and 565,000 respectively, and even then the bilingual figures must be accepted with very great reserve, knew but a few words of Irish The second fundamental in which the parallel fails is that neither was there any demand on the part of the Irish speakers to have their tongue taught as the vernacular, nor, save for the few enthusiasts of the League itself, did Anglo-Irish speakers desire to have English and Irish placed on the same level in the schools. Native speakers looked upon their mother tongue as something only suitable for addressing their pigs. Thirdly, Irish was dying a natural death: it was not being extinguished by English repression. This statement may be challenged, but it is incontrovertible. It is true that England had from the year 1367 been passing sundry statutes against the speaking of Irish, but these were a dead letter outside the pale, and inside it practically unenforceable. In the eighteenth century the penal laws drew such |