IT is sad to look on the title-page of Irish Memories,
and sorrowful to realise that it is the last on which we
shall see the joyous names of E. Œ. Somerville and
Martin Ross coupled together. It was bound to be
sorrowful whenever it happened; but in these days we
have too little of the salt of life and a great need of it.
Death has divided these two ladies, whom no critic
poring over their books could separate. We say 'poring',
because the stories have this of 'classical' quality--that
while thousands of ordinary folk read them for sheer
delight and the fun of it, and the hunting man and the
Irishman recur to them affectionately, recognising their
knowledge of the sport and the people 'from the heart
out', a man whose business is with the art of story-
telling may study them with ever-renewed wonder,
marking page after page on which not a sentence can
be spared nor a half-dozen words rearranged without
spoiling 'the sweet wild twist of the song'.

Miss Somerville has not let us into the secret, prob-
ably because she could not--it is incommunicable. Nor
does she do more than tease our wonder, which is every-
body's, at the unity of style she and Martin Ross
achieved. On this point she reduces curiosity to a unity
of folly. We are one with the babbling lady who asked--

'Are you the Miss Somerville who writes the books with Miss
Martin? To think that I should have been talking to you all
this time! And is it you that do the story and Miss Martin the

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