No sooner was the captain seen to leave the ship than the Clovelly men lost their repugnance to go to sea.  They manned boats at once, gained the Margaret Quail, and claimed three thousand pounds for salvage.

There was an action in court, as the owners refused to pay such a sum; and it was lost by the Clovelly men, who however got an award of twelve hundred pounds.  The case turned somewhat on the presence of the dog on the wreck; and it was argued that the vessel was not deserted, because a dog had been left on board to keep guard for its masters.  The owner of the cargo failed; and the amount actually paid to the salvors was six hundred pounds to two steam-tugs (three hundred pounds each), and three hundred pounds to the Clovelly skiff and sixteen men.

Mr. Hawker went round the country indignantly denouncing the sailors of Clovelly, and with justice.  It roused all the righteous wrath in his breast.  And as may well be believed, no love was borne him by the inhabitants of that little fishing village.  They would probably have made a wreck of him had he ventured among them.

Jane Barlow

(18-)

The general reader has yet to learn the most private and sacred events of Miss Jane Barlow’s life, now known only to herself and friends.  She is the daughter of Dr. Barlow of Trinity College, and lives in the seclusion of a collage at Raheny, a hamlet near Dublin.  Her family has been in Ireland for generations, and she comes of German and Norman stock.  As some one has said, the knowledge and skill displayed in depicting Irish peasant life, which her books show, are hers not through Celtic blood and affinities, but by a sympathetic genius and inspiration.

[Illustration:  Jane Barlow]

The publication of her writings in book form was preceded by the appearance of some poems and stories in the magazines, the Dublin University Review of 1885 containing ’Walled Out; or, Eschatology in a Bog.’  ‘Irish Idyls’ (1892), and ‘Bogland Studies’ (of the same year), show the same pitiful, sombre pictures of Irish peasant life about the sodden-roofed mud hut and “pitaties” boiling, which only a genial, impulsive, generous, light-hearted, half-Greek and half-philosophic people could make endurable to the reader or attractive to the writer.  The innate sweetness of the Irish character, which the author brings out with fine touches, makes it worth portrayal.  “It is safe to say,” writes a critic, “that the philanthropist or the political student interested in the eternal Irish problem will learn more from Miss Barlow’s twin volumes than from a dozen Royal Commissions and a hundred Blue Books.”  Her sympathy constantly crops out, as, for instance, in the mirthful tale of ‘Jerry Dunne’s Basket,’ where—­