windows, breast-high, designed, as now used, for defense in time of war.  The room is meagrely furnished, with a table on which are powder-flask, touch-box, etc., for charging guns, a stool or two, and an open keg of powder.  The whole look of the place, bare and martial, but depressed, bespeaks a losing fight.  On the hearth the ashes of a fire are white, and on the chimneypiece a brace of candles are guttering out.

The five men who hold the Gatehouse wear much soiled and torn military dress.  They are pale, powder-begrimed, sunken-eyed, with every mark of weariness of body and soul.  Their leader, JOHN TALBOT, is standing at one of the shot-windows, with piece presented, looking forth.  He is in his mid-twenties, of Norman-Irish blood, and distinctly of a finer, more nervous type than his companions.  He has been wounded, and bears his left hand wrapped in a bloody rag.  DICK FENTON, a typical, careless young English swashbuckler, sits by the table, charging a musket, and singing beneath his breath as he does so.  He, too, has been wounded, and bears a bandage about his knee.  Upon the floor (at right) KIT NEWCOMBE lies in the sleep of utter exhaustion.  He is an English lad, in his teens, a mere tired, haggard child, with his head rudely bandaged.  On a stool by the hearth sits MYLES BUTLER, a man of JOHN TALBOT’S own years, but a slower, heavier, almost sullen type.  Beside him kneels PHELIMY DRISCOLL, a nervous, dark Irish lad, of one and twenty.  He is resting his injured arm across BUTLER’S knee, and BUTLER is roughly bandaging the hurt.

For a moment there is a weary, heavy silence, in which the words of the song which FENTON sings are audible.  It is the doleful old strain of “the hanging-tune.”

[Footnote 1:  Included by permission of the author and of Messrs. Henry Holt and Company, the publishers, from the volume Allison’s Lad and Other Martial Interludes. (1910).]

FENTON (singing).

Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me,
And will thy favors never greater be? 
Wilt thou, I say, forever breed me pain,
And wilt thou not restore my joys again?

BUTLER (shifting DRISCOLL’S arm, none too tenderly).  More to the light!

DRISCOLL (catching breath with pain).  Ah!  Softly, Myles!

JOHN TALBOT (leaning forward tensely).  Ah!

FENTON.  Jack!  Jack Talbot!  What is it that you see?

JOHN TALBOT (with the anger of a man whose nerves are strained almost beyond endurance).  What should I see but Cromwell’s watch-fires along the boreen?  What else should I see, and the night as black as the mouth of hell?  What else should I see, and a pest choke your throat with your fool’s questions, Dick Fenton!

(Resumes his watch.)

FENTON (as who should say:  “I thank you!").  God ‘a’
mercy—­Captain Talbot!

(Resumes his singing.)