In the SEPTEMBER CENTURY "THE WHISTLER JOURNAL" by Joseph and Elisabeth Robins Pennell The combination of the Whistler and Pennell names insures wide interest in this condensation of the "Journal" the Pennells kept in preparation for the writing of the "Life" of Whistler. The pages scintillate with Whistler's prismatic English and flashing wit. Illustrated with pen-and-ink sketches by Whistler, including Whistler's portrait of himself. THE ASH-CAN by James Lane Allen A rare story of the universal habit of emptying the ash-cans of our trouble on our friends' heads. THE FASCISTI by Giuseppe Prezzolini An informative paper by an eminent journalist of Rome of the adventurous bands who took the law into their own hands as the Government of Italy looked idly on. AMERICAN ARCHITECTURAL TENDENCIES by C. Matlack Price A pertinent paper by an able critic of architecture, illustrated with drawings of significant American buildings by Hugh Ferriss. MY FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS A paper of intimate reminiscences. by Hamlin Garland "GIVE US THIS DAY Our Daily Bread" by Edward A. Filene The well-known Boston merchant considers the problem of getting this ancient prayer answered in the light of the present international economic tangle. Courtesy and JAPAN by Julian Street A paper that is at once an essay on courtesy and an incisive comment on our diplomatic manners. THE LAST of the GREAT by Alexander Black The third of the trilogy of essays we have been presenting from Mr. Black's whimsical pen. Important articles by Herbert Adams Gibbons, Harry Franck, Sydney Greenbie and notable fiction by Donn Byrne, Ben Ames Williams, Grant Showerman, and Phyllis Bottome. The CENTURY MAGAZINE T VOL. 102 August 1921 No. 4 Messer Marco Polo By DONN BYRNE Drawings by C. B. FALLS HE message came to me, at the second check of the hunt, that a countryman and a clansman needed me. The ground was heavy, the day raw, and it was a drag, too fast for fun and too tame for sport. So I blessed the countryman and the clansman, and turned my back on the field. But when they told me his name, I all but fell from the saddle. "But that man 's dead!" But he was n't dead. He was in New York. He was traveling from the craigs of Ulster to his grandson, who had an orange-grove on the Indian River, in Florida. He was n't dead. And I said to myself with impatience, "Must every man born ninety years ago be dead?" "But this is a damned thing," I thought, "to be saddled with a man over ninety years old. To have to act as garde-malade at my age! Why could n't he have stayed and died at home? Sure, one of these days he will die, as we all die, and the ghost of him will never be content on the sluggish river, by the mossy trees, where the blue herons and the white cranes and the great gray pelicans fly. It will be going back, I know, to the booming surf and the red-berried rowan-trees and the barking eagles of Antrim. To die out of Ulster, when one can die in Ulster, there is a gey foolish thing..." But the harsh logic of Ulster left me, and the soft mood of Ulster came on me, as I remembered him, and I going into the town on the train. And the late winter grass of Westchester, spare, scrofulous; the jerry-built bungalows; the lines of uncomely linen; the blatant advertising boards-all the unbeauty of it passed away, and I was again in the Antrim glens. There was the soft purple of the Irish Channel, and there the soft, dim outline of Scotland. There was the herring school silver in the sun, and I could see it from the crags where the surf boomed like a drum. And underfoot was the heather, the springy heather, the belled and purple heather. .. There is a ribbon from my only love in my pocket deep, And the women of Europe they could not cure my grief, alas! I am done with you until a narrow coffin be made for me! And until the grass shall grow after that up through my heart! And I suddenly discovered on the rumbling train that apart from the hurling and the foot-ball and the jumping of horses, what life I remembered of Ulster was bound up in Malachi Campbell of the Long Glen... A very strange old man, hardy as a blackthorn, immense, bowed shoulders, the face of some old hawk of the mountains, hair white and plentiful as some old cardinal's. All his kinsfolk were dead except for one granddaughter... And he had become a tradition in the glens... It was said he had been an ecclesiastical student abroad, in Valladolid,.. and that he had forsaken that life. And in France he had been a tutor in the family of MacMahon, roi d'Irlande, and somewhere he had married, and his wife had died and left him money, and he had come back to Antrim. He had been in the Papal Zouaves, and fought also in the American Civil War... A strange old figure who knew Greek and Latin as well as • .. .. Antrim will ever color my own writing. My Fifth Avenue will have something in it of the heather glen. My people will have always a phrase, a thought, a flash of Scots-Irish mysticism, and for that I must either thank or blame Malachi Campbell of the Long Glen. The stories I heard, and I young, were not of Little Rollo and Sir Walter Scott's, but the horrible tale of the Naked Hangman, who goes through the Valleys on Midsummer's Eve; of Dermot, and Granye of the Bright Breasts; of the Cattle Raid of Maeve, Queen of Connacht; of the old age of Cuchulain in the Island of Skye; grisly, homely stories, such as yon of the ghostly foot-ballers of Cushendun, whose ball is a skull, and whose goal is the portals of a ruined graveyard; strange religious poems, like the Dialogue of Death and the Sinner: Do thugainn loistin do gach deoraidh treith-lag I used to give lodging to every poor wanderer; Food and drink to him I would see in want, His proper payment to the man requesting reckoning, Och! Is not Jesus hard if he condemns me! All these stories, of all these people he told, had the unreal, shimmering quality of that mirage that is seen from Portrush cliffs, a glittering city in a golden desert, surrounded by a strange sea mist. All these songs, all these words he spoke, were native, had the same tang as the turf smoke, the Gaelic quality that is in dark lakes on mountain summits, in plovers' nests amid |