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As for the pursuit of the Irish language, if one may deduce anything from these statutes, the chase is already becoming faint. It is true that the Army Act may provide that "officers and men shall be taught to give executive words of command in each of the official languages," and the barrack square shall ring with an incoherent medley of Erse and Anglo-Saxon. But when it comes to learning more than a few odd words, the usual extent of a Gaelic education, zeal waxes cold. Unfortunately the Constitution has saddled the country with the necessity for translating all its statutes into Irish, and this requirement is recoiling on its own head. The first few Acts have been published with English and Irish side by side, but the official translators are now sadly

lagging in the wake of the output of the Dail, and most recent Acts, except for their title, appear in English alone. The invention of a neo-pseudo Gaelic tongue to fit the wording of legislation, which is inevitably drafted on the phraseology of English statute law, has proved a tedious and, when it is completed, a useless operation, although affording employment for a number of harmless students who might otherwise be employed on less peaceful pursuits. Consequently the longer statutes are being left aside for more urgent work, and in the main only those are selected which are likely to reach foreign hands, and whose bilingualism would therefore be likely to advertise the Free State as an alien nation. There is one exception. The very recent Intoxicating Liquor Act has been produced in two tongues with such rapidity that it must be deduced that the Irish language, even in its antiquated state, was rich in phrases which reek of peat-smoke, pot-stills, and shebeens. No difficulty was therefore presented in an early and richly-worded edition of the Act in the vernacular. There is little doubt that in it is contained the bouquet of that exotic vintage which Dail legislation is cultivating with such excellent taste.

A CASTLE IN SPAIN.

BY EDMUND CANDLER.

'On Fontarabian echoes born."

THERE is a castle for sale in Fontarabia. It bears the name of the Emperor Charles V., but it is much older than that. One could people it with the ghosts of all the ages. Some say the Visigoths built it; it was certainly a strong hold of the Kings of Navarre in the twelfth century. On the other hand, it is not in a good state of repair, and I have never discovered any Spanish functionary who was willing to name a definite, or even an indefinite, sum for the purchase of it. Still, there it is, and one can poke one's nose into every nook and cranny, unattended, for the modest sum of five sous. Probably it could be bought by any moderately successful captain of industry for the turnover of half a year's manufacture of hairpins or boot-laces.

Fontarabia is generally the first place people see in Spain. But I had come to it from the south, and in my divagations on the road had stayed at Jaca, Huesca, Tudela, Burgos, and Santanilla in Santander. So it was not the novelty of a little old Spanish town that attracted me, nor the mere fascination of a name. The name, of course, had something to do with it. It is

woven into the coloured tapestry that most of us keep at the back of our minds. Probably Milton put it there. Milton, or the atlas, or both. Milton, one may be sure, always had an atlas in mind when he invoked the Celestial Muse, an aid to the invention of harmonies; and he turned to it, as the schoolboy to his Gradus ad Parnassum, to swell the organ note. He could not resist the seduction of a name.

"When Charlemain with all his peerage fell

By Fontarabia."

It was not Charlemagne, by the way, but Roland. Charlemagne died in his bed. Nor was it at Fontarabia that Roland fell, but at Roncesvalles, fifty miles to the east, in the Pyrenees. And it was not Fontarábia, but Fontarabía. Still, it would be pedantry to quibble at a trifle of fifty miles, a pin's-head distance on the map. The point is that Fontarabía, or Fontarábia, scan it how you will, is a sounding name, and Milton could not resist it.

Some one, of course, will object that Milton was blind when he wrote "Paradise Lost," and that he could not look up places on a map. This, we

if not Bayona, the lighthouse at Biarritz that looks down on Bayona's hold, a thin white obelisk piercing the blue, with the rim of the Landes coastline behind it, curving out beyond the mouth of the Adour like a white sickle to meet the Atlantic.

admit, is an afterthought. Still, One can see Bayona from we retract nothing. Not that the castle at Fontarabia; or, we believe for a moment that a daughter was called in to spell out place-names on the Spanish frontier. Milton must have carried his atlas in his head long before he was blind. He was as happy with a name as with an argument. When he was not jousting at Aspramont or Montalban, or wandering in Vallambrosa, where "the Etrurian shades high overarched embower," he would be at Ilium or with Charlemain at Fontarabia. That is a name Il Penseroso would share with the Unseen Genius of the Wood. One may be sure the arched walks and twilight groves of Horton echoed to it. He would have discovered it, if not before, in the happy hours when he was writing the last lines of "Lycidas," an atlas open by his side, canvassing the coast names for points in the watery march of him "to our moist Vows denied."

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What would one not give for Milton's atlas, the one he had at Horton and must have taken with him on the Italian tour! It would be worth a dozen ivy - grown dismantled keeps which nobody seems to want to buy. The notice of sale in the castle at Fontarabia has been posted up for at least fifty years. I have seen it quoted in a book of Spanish travel dated 1880, and it is not likely that it was new then.

What strikes one

as odd at first is that the inscription is not in Spanish or French, but in very indifferent English. It is not odd really, as it only points to the wit and wideawakeness of the provincial councillors of Guipuzcoa, who knew the value Nordic sentiment attaches to castles in Spain, and posted their naïve advertisement over the door leading into the delightful little patio where the weapons used in ancient sieges rust among the orange-trees and wallflowers.

The surprising thing to me was that nobody had bought the castle. It is impossible that any one drawn there by the advertisement could be disD

appointed. Fontarabia is a name with no deceit in it, like Cherry Hinton, for instance, or Shepherd's Bush. The little shell of a town pleases the eye as its name the ear. If there is any fallacious suggestion it is historical, not visual. The Arabs and Moors were never there, and fons rapidus is a false derivation. Fontarabia is the corruption of the Basque name for a river that is choked with sand.

The estuary of the Bidassoa is most beautiful at low tide. One looks down from the castle on striated shoals like the backs of scallop-shells fresh from the sea, only much brighter. When the sun is setting or irradiates them opaquely through mist, they glow like the wings of cherubim or cumuli in the sky, and the dwarfed channels, as they become thinner and more separated, weave a quicklychanging pattern, a web of white light thrown on a surface of violet, and rose, and amber, and mother of pearl. Then the estuary becomes a sandy desert. The black vibrating figures on the other side, like birds magnified in a mirage or scouting Bedouin, are the fisherwomen of Hendaye searching for bait in the sand. There is a constant interplay of sunshine and mist, of sea and mud and sand, that makes the estuary the most subtle, sensitive, and fickle landscape on the coast of France or Spain. Romance is dead, I thought, as I stood on the castle roof and watched this marriage of

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the North and South, the transformation into the tawny desert of the turquoise-blue lagoon : romance is dead, if nobody wants to become Lord of the Castillo Carlo Quinto at Fontarabia in Spain.

Yet I always think of the castle as upholstered and inhabited. It was bought and sold, so far as the reminiscent part of me is concerned, as I was climbing the stairs. I suppose psychologists would explain the illusion as a trick played on the waking consciousness by the subliminal self. Why at Fontarabia of all places in the world should I subconsciously in a waking dream find myself repeating the unromantic name of Bugg? Bugs, to be sure, are common in Spain. But I had not been attacked by one-not since Tudela. Besides, this Bugg was spelt with two g's.

Now, how on earth did I know that? Why is it that when one is very hot and tired and sleepy words and names, sometimes the merest nonsense, run in one's head; and though one may not know what they mean, one knows how they are spelt as clearly as if they were written on the wall?

I was half-way up the first flight of the solid wooden staircase leading out of the patio when I began to ask myself what manner of suggestion or significance could be attached to the name of Bugg.

"Bugg, Bugg, Bugg," I repeated, as I painfully climbed the second flight. "Why

Bugg?"
or reason in it. Rhyme, per-
haps, certainly no reason.

There is no rhyme of a legacy, for instance, or in the nomination of a chatelaine for a castle in Spain, Number One might do worse than listen to Number Two. In the colloquy on the roof of the Castillo Carlo Quinto at Fontarabia on this particular June morning, Number One and Number Two were in complete accord. It was decided between them that the castle should be bequeathed to Convolvulus Bugg.

On a stone seat in the alcove of a window on the third floor the phenomenon called waking took place, and I began to ask myself what manner of suggestion or significance could be attached to the name of Bugg. I remembered now that I had been tolerably familiar with it. I dug deeper down into my memory, and retrieved the prenomen. Now I had it. Bugg. Why, yes, to be sure. Convolvulus Bugg. What had happened on the stairs was that my subliminal self, had bequeathed the castle with its banqueting-hall, dungeons, torture-chambers, ivied patio, and the panoramic view it commanded over France and Spain to Convolvulus Bugg.

But why Convolvulus Bugg? For the very good reason-so there was reason in it, after all that no fitter person could be found to inherit, though the supraliminal booby was much too dull a dog to have thought of it. As a matter of fact, he had forgotten the existence of Convolvulus. The dreaming partner, Number Two, who sits weaving under the threshold, has a better memory, and often a larger share of wit. It is Number Two who receives the drab threads, the prose of life, that Number One hands down to him under the threshold, and weaves a coloured pattern out of them. In any question of poetic justice, in the matter

What now follows is Number One's contribution, the prose, logic, and bald fact of the case, the data on which Number Two drew up his deed of gift.

Convolvulus, when I knew her at the age of nine, was an incurably poetical and romantic child. She was always reading Byron or Shelley, and mumbling poetry on the garden seat under my window. Mrs Bugg may have been romantic. She was a pale elusive phantom in the house; I did not know her well, but I base my inference on the fancy she indulged of giving all her daughters the name of a flower. Convolvulus Bugg had four sisters - Lilac, Daffodil, Pansy, and Rose. Old Bugg humoured his wife so far, but whether out of a spirit. of homeliness, or merely to simplify nomenclature, he would not sanction the name of a plant which he could not see growing when he inspected the world from the porch of his inn. In this he displayed prudence. For none of his daughters grew up in the least degree exotic. I could not picture a Magnolia, or even a

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