The recent decision of the Imperial Conference that the Dominions are autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status and in no way subordinate to one another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, proves that this concession is no longer contested by England.

There is one other element which must not be overlooked. Every patriotic Irishman loves Ireland more than he ever hated England, and because he loves Ireland he wants to see her united as one political unit from sea to sea. This end can never be reached by the Republican road within the lifetime of living man. It may and probably will be reached by a federal process within the British Commonwealth before many years are past. This factor cannot be ignored by any farseeing Irish statesman. It is difficult to see how anything save gratuitous interference or aggression by England is likely to provoke hostilities between the two countries, and I believe no English government of any complexion will take that responsibility. England has wisely written off the Free State in her books as a bad debt and will never again seek to enforce payment. Thus, while it is still true, in the words of Parnell, that 'no man can set bounds to the march of a nation,' it is also true that the future of Ireland will develop through an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary process.

Mr. Cosgrave accurately described the present relations between Ireland and England when, on receiving the freedom of Manchester in November last, he said: 'I feel that your people and mine, separated for centuries by a tragic series of events, can now give an example to the world of what may be achieved by free association between free nations. We have the most profound conviction that present relations will ripen into sincere and lasting

friendship, and that the people of these two islands, cast by God so close together on the surface of the sea, while differing in racial and national characteristics, will henceforth devote themselves rather to discovering grounds of common endeavor and common achievement than to seeking in the pages of history for memories of bitter things which must be buried forever, and to finding therein that lasting peace and friendship which God has surely destined for us.'

This attitude reveals not only true statesmanship but true Christianity. If these principles are followed on both sides of the Irish Sea the stability of the Free State is assured. But far more, even, than this is involved, because on the good relations existing between Ireland and England depends in great measure the attitude of the greater Irish race beyond the seas. The future of Anglo-American relations, which involve more than any other single international factor the peace of the world, must be vitally influenced by that attitude. Ireland has a great and noble part to play upon that vaster stage. At home we have many advantages. Our external debt is negligible. We have no foreign entanglements. Our chief industry, agriculture, is essentially stable in nature, and our people are among the most conservative in Europe. Our climate is mild and equable. Peace and order reign throughout the land. The German engineers on the Shannon, the Belgian sugar factory at Carlow, and the Ford factory at Cork have shown clearly that our workmen are intelligent and industrious. They have proved, so that he who runs may read, that the destiny of the Free State rests ultimately on the honest work of its individual citizens. Our national motto must be Sursum corda. Freedom has been achieved, but it is the beginning and not the end of our journey.

CHLOE

CHLOE stepped out on the porch of her little cabin. She was small, supple, and yellow, and as she spoke she kept bending and gesturing.

'I see you comin' 'crost country like a lighten-gale,' she said, smiling, and the lines around her large mouth were like spreading circles in water.

She had a comical face, the forehead receding and the jaw projecting, with high-lifted eyebrows above her protruding eyes. Her crinkly hair, parted from forehead to neck, was plaited, and worn in a circular rosette behind each ear. She was scrupulously neat.

'We all so-so,' she said, in answer to my greeting, 'although Enoch, he ain't much. But then that's natchel. In the spring, you know, the boil always rises in the cistern.'

Chloe's pronunciation was elegant. She always spoke of a pint of flour as a 'point,' and was alluding now to the bile in the system.

Her little cabin, on the outskirts of Natchez, stood on the very edge of the bayou, its roof swept by the gray moss of a great live oak. A tiny paled-in garden in front had beds bordered with violets and was full of red lilies.

colored pastor, in a plush frame decorated with a crush bow of Nile green satin.

Chloe gave me her best rockingchair and stood until I asked her to be seated.

'So you've been to the plantation?' she exclaimed. 'How's all the folks? Aunt Nicey have n't moved off yet? She mus' be all of ninety. She stayed with us endurin' of the high water. All the time honin' to get back to the plantation. All the Palmyra folks were. They were currentined so long, the men would ha' been 'rested as vacants if they'd a hung roun' Natchez, doin' nuthin', much longer.'

Chloe had been the upstairs servant at Monmouth. She was quick, bright, enthusiastic, and responsive, with a positive genius for misusing words. Her husband, Enoch, a dark, unknown quantity, was only visualized through her fluency, and their one child, Cassandra, I remembered as a whirlwind of arms and legs, driving the turkeys past the Big House, morning and night. 'I want you to tell me about old times,' I said.

Chloe threw out both hands. 'Oh, it's all changed!' she cried. 'Natchez would have been an indifferent place

In the front room was a fine walnut set. There was a red tester above the bed, and a red-striped lambrequin on the high mantelshelf. On the backs of the chairs were clean white hemstitched towels. China and glass ornaments adorned the bureau, and crayon portraits hung on the papered walls. On a table was a large photograph of the

youthful young girl myself, but I remember the levee days when the ladies driv to see one another. These ole places all gone to rack now, and a whole passle of new people in town. They're climbin' steady.'

Her tone was politely scornful.

'I were fifty-three this gone May,' she continued. 'I always worked to the Big House. Even when I were little

I helped on-sheet the beds. I married when I were seventeen. I wore a Swiss dress with ruffles on the tail. Ole Miss had it made for me, an' it were a perfect germ. The 'Pistopal minister married me in the big hall at Monmouth. Enoch, he looked gamey then. Thist as spry an' sprout. So sprutish. He were tendin' resteroy at the time. They made him treasurer because he was such a savery man. The resteroy shop were owned by a kinder bossy bully ooman, an' she got very ill toward him after he married. It became a jealousy, an' she caused desease to creep upon him. He got porer an' porer, an' wade away to a wapor, an' at last he had to go to a doctor's cemetarium.

'Cassandra were born about that time, an' that's what th'owed me. I had to scramble to help the family, an' I uster feel right squandered in my min'. All my white folks gone, an' the Big House on the hill shut up. I'd go outside at night an' look up at it, dark an' still, an' I'd hol' out my arms, an' call for help. But no help came. All I'd hear was the quivel owl in the bayou, saying he-e-e-e!'

She brightened.

'But I taken it very Jobly,' she said, 'an' we've done well since then. I were offered a place to the Shielses', an' I took it in a winkle. An' Enoch, he driv a liver wagon. But that resteroy lady would n't let him be. She was black an' evil-minded, an' had little mercurial ways to worry you, an' he got a backhanded letter 'bout froggin' him. She thought she was going to devote me, but I would n't let her, but Enoch was tore up in his min', an' he's kinder knocked off from work since then.

'Oh, yes'm! Work's plentiful. I'm washin' now. Doin' up these-here corkbosom shirts, an' fine wais's. Enoch, he scratches roun' an' makes us a gyarden, an' Cassandra, she teaches. She

Chloe laughed enjoyably.

'Yes. Cassandra's my right han'. An' now she's come thu. She were baptized this past gone Sunday in Macedonia. The baptizin' passed off beautiful. All the cannidates were perfectly qualified an' quiet, an' the roster were decorated with flowers. Yes'm, we all got religion. I b'longs to the Courts Calanthus. It were named for Damon's wife. We wears canary color an' red, copied after Damon's robe. Enoch, he b'longs to the Knights of Pathos.

'Yes'm, Cassandra's engaged. Bob Patton's courtin' her. He's livin' with us. No'm. They ain't goin' to marry yet awhile. He's tied. He were courtin' a bright girl on St. Catherine Street, an' she put her accident on him, an' he were kinder conscrip' up. He could 'a' been loose long ago, but he were kinder cowered like on account of her mother.' She lowered her voice. "Folks goes to her to get knowledge.'

When I rose at last, she exclaimed, 'Oh, mus' you go? Can't you have mercy, an' stay a little longer? Nearly dark?'

She opened the door and looked out. 'Why, the sun mus' be in a clip!' she cried.

In the little garden she filled my hands with red lilies. Then she stood with her hands locked and her head on the side.

'You sho' do hol' your own, Miss Rosie,' she said admiringly. Then, in

'I never expect to be.'

There was a thoughtful look on Chloe's face as she opened the sagging gate, which was wired to the palings, and stood aside to let me pass.

'Well, I kin tell you this much,' she said. She lifted her brows, closed her eyes, and smiled with faint scorn. 'You ain't missin' a thing.'

WATER

THE lady in evening dress, cut low and adorned with green sequins, addressed eagerly a tall, spare gentleman who was staring out of the window in astonishment at the blurred lights, the dingy houses, the unclean rain.

'Oh, Mr. Marlowe, I have been reading some of your poems from the Persian and I am simply in love with them! They give one the atmosphere of the country so completely. Do you know, I begin to envy you every minute of time that you spent in that delightful land of rose gardens, nightingales, and running brooks -'

'Er- not exactly,' said the tall man. Then he added: "The country, for instance, between Yezd and Kashan is so barren, so desolate, that you can ride across it for days and hardly see a tree, a human habitation, a piece of cultivated ground. And as for running brooks!'

The phrase seemed to bring something into his mind. He hesitated, considered, and then went on: 'I had been riding on this road for thirteen days and was approaching Kashan, my destination. Toward noon of the last day, I came upon a small wayside posthouse, which for an hour had been a speck on the horizon. It was a brown, square, windowless building, covered, as buildings often are in treeless countries, by a dome. Its squareness

a Byzantine, an ecclesiastical air. I was surprised to see a few servants, in blue livery, lounging before the arched entrance. I concluded that some traveler of consequence was tarrying there.

"The servants disappeared when they caught sight of me. And very soon a portly individual, clad in a gaberdine of neutral shade and wearing a green sash round his waist, emerged from the building. He took his stand on the porch, a little in advance of his retinue, and awaited my approach. When I rode up he greeted me in the genteel phraseology of usage. But, discerning my embarrassment, he made haste to inform me that he was Seyyid Abbas, a merchant of Kashan. I remembered then that I had letters to a person of this name from a friend in Yezd. News of my approach must have reached him, and in the polite Persian manner he had ridden out a dozen miles to greet me on the road.

'I had been riding thirteen days. I was covered with dust, half blinded by the sun, exasperated by the termless monotony, irritated that I should have chosen to travel such dolorous spaces. So that when he inquired how I had fared on my journey I spoke disparagingly of his country - to one who had ridden out a dozen miles to greet me on the road.

'He replied with confidence, with good humor: "Wait until evening."

'My host had ordered his servants to prepare lunch in the posthouse. He ushered me, in due course, into the principal chamber. I found the earth floor garnished with a noble carpet from Kashan, where the best carpets in the world are woven. On the carpet a printed cloth was spread. It was dotted with little bowls of stews and sweetmeats; and like a sun, in the centre of that fragrant system, lay a huge metal platter, heaped with steaming rice.

'I confess that my ill temper was in a measure appeased by this gratifying display. As for my host, the sight of those good things had put him in the best of humor. Gently he rallied me on my peevishness.

""Why, O Sah'b, have your times become so bitter? Behold, your journey reaches its end. And because it is fitting that the end should be pleasant and memorable, I will show you this day a wonder which will repay the burden of a thousand farsakhs."

‘I had never before visited Kashan. As for my host, he informed me that he had never left it! I was curious to discover what might be there which he held in such esteem. I recounted in my mind what I had read or heard concerning Kashan, but I could not recall anything of renown; except perhaps the fact, on which all later travelers are agreed, that two-thirds of it is a ruin, the habitation of scorpions and pariah dogs.

'In the late afternoon, at my friend's bidding, we turned off from the main road. We found ourselves, suddenly, in a large walled enclosure, filled with dusty trees. The sight of trees, gray and dust-covered though they were, was a relief to me, after intolerable leagues of sun-scorched desert. I spied, in the centre of the garden, a kind of kiosk, which had been decorated once with gay-colored tiles. But there were brown gaps in the walls where the tiles had fallen, showing the cracked and crumbling masonry beneath.

"This is Feen," said my friend Seyyid Abbas, the merchant.

'I had heard of the garden, Feen. It was made, tradition said, by the great Shah Abbas, for a place of rest on the main road to Isfahan, his capital. It was restored, three generations ago, by the Wasp-Waisted One, the man of three hundred wives, FathAli Shah. His familiar black-bearded

visage and wasp-like figure still adorned a crumbling inner wall of the kiosk.

'Seyyid Abbas beckoned to me and I followed him to another part of the garden. Soon he stopped and pointed to a little stream of water, no bigger than a man's arm, which issued by a broken conduit from a bank of earth. It ran for a dozen yards and emptied into a brimming water tank. Then Seyyid Abbas, the merchant, said:— 'Sah'b, in the whole of Feranghistan, which you have seen and which I have not seen, tell me, is there a stream of water equal to this stream of water?"

666

'What could I answer? My mind roamed the earth and considered its rivers. I thought of a thousand ships setting, in distant seas, their several courses for the yellow Thames; I thought of the Nile, ancient and august; of the holy Ganges; of the prodigious Congo, steaming, pestilent, miasmic; of the Father of Waters, bearing on his banks a dozen cities; of the Amazon; of Niagara!

"He said, "I perceive that astonishment has dried up the fountains of speech. Yet this morning you were looking without favor upon my country."

"I answered, "What petition shall be made? I spoke quickly and without understanding."

'He waved a deprecating hand and said, with becoming modesty, "On this engaging theme an obscure poet of Kashan has composed appropriate verses; so nearly do they approach the classic models that they have been mistaken for a ghazel of Hafiz. Begins:

""More agreeable than the distant, repeated call of the partridge

Is the murmur, O Iran, of thy delectable waters;

The barren desert heard it and was changed
Into a moonlit garden of dark cypresses,
Which has become the refuge of the rose
And the place of torture of the nightingale."'