Chapter 7

_The two Cats are looking over the settle_.

_Music behind scene: "O Johnny, I hardly knew you!"_

_1st Cat_: We did well leaving the bellows for that foolish Human to see what he can do. There is great sport before us and behind.

_2nd Cat_: The best I ever saw since the Jesters went out from Tara.

_1st Cat_: They to be giving themselves high notions and to be looking down on Cats!

_2nd Cat_: Ha, Ha, Ha, the folly and the craziness of men! To see him changing them from one thing to the next, as if they wouldn't be a two-legged laughing stock whatever way they would change.

_1st Cat_: There's apt to be more changes yet till they will hardly know one another, or every other one, to be himself! _(Sings.)_

"Where are your eyes that looked so mild, Hurroo! Hurroo! Where are your eyes that looked so mild When my poor heart you first beguiled, Why did you run from me and the child? O Johnny, I hardly knew you!

"With drums and guns and guns and drums, The enemy nearly slew you! My darling dear you look so queer, O Johnny, I hardly knew you!

"Where are the legs with which you run, When you went to carry a gun. Indeed your dancing days are done, O Johnny, I hardly knew you!"

_(Timothy and Mother come in from opposite doors. Cats disappear--music still heard faintly.)_

_Mother: (Looking at little bellows in her hand.)_ Do you know _That_ what it is, Timothy?

_Timothy_: Is it now a hand-bellows? It's long since I seen the like of that.

_Mother_: It is, but _what_ bellows?

_Timothy_: Not a bellows? I'd nearly say it to be one.

_Mother_: There has strange things come to pass.

_Timothy_: That's what we've all been praying for this long time!

_Mother_: Ah, can't you give attention and strive to listen to me. It is all coming back to my mind. All the things I am remembering have my mind tattered and tossed.

_Timothy: (Who has been trying to hear the music, sings a verse.)_

"You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg, Hurroo! Hurroo! You're a yellow noseless chickenless egg, You'll have to put up with a bowl to beg. O Johnny, I hardly knew you!

_(Music ceases.)_

_Mother_: Will you give attention, I say! It will be worth while for you to go chat with me now I can be telling you all that happened in my years gone by. What was it Conan was questioning me about a while ago? What was it now....

"Aristotle in the hour He left Ireland left a power!"...

_Timothy_: That now is a very nice sort of a little prayer.

_Mother: (Calling out.)_ That's it! Aristotle's Bellows! I know now what has happened. This that is in my hand has in it the power to make changes. Changes! Didn't great changes come in the house to-day! _(Shouts.)_ Did you see any great change in Celia?

_Timothy_: Why wouldn't I, and she at this minute fighting and barging at some poor travelling man, saying he laid a finger mark of bacon-grease upon the lintel of the door. Driving him off with a broken-toothed rake she is, she that was so gentle that she wouldn't hardly pluck the feathers of a dead duck!

_Mother_: It was surely a blast of this worked that change in her, as the blast she blew upon me worked a change in myself. O! all the thoughts and memories that are thronging in my mind and in my head! Rushing up within me the same as chaff from the flail! Songs and stories and the newses I heard through the whole course of my lifetime! And I having no person to tell them out to! Do you hear me what I'm saying, Timothy? _(Shouts in his ear.)_ What is come back to me is what I lost so long ago, my MEMORY.

_Timothy_: So it is a very good song.

_(Sings.)_

"By Memory inspired, and love of glory fired, The deeds of men I love to dwell upon, And the sympathetic glow of my spirit must bestow On the memory of Mitchell that is gone, boys, gone-- The memory of Mitchell that is gone!"

_Mother_: Thoughts crowding on one another, mixing themselves up with one another for the want of sifting and settling! They'll have me distracted and I not able to speak them out to some person! Conan as surly as a bramble bush, and Celia wrapped up in her bucket and her broom! And yourself not able to hear one word I say. _(Sobs, and bellows falls from her hands.)_

_Timothy_: I'll lay it down now out of your way, ma'am, the way you can cry your fill whatever ails you.

_Mother: (Snatching it back.)_ Stop! I'll not part with it! I know now what I can do! Now! _(Points it at him.)_ I'll make a companion to be listening to me through the long winter nights and the long summer days, and the world to be without any end at all, no more than the round of the full moon! You that have no hearing, this will bring back your hearing, the way you'll be a listener and a benefit to myself for ever. I wouldn't feel the weeks long that time!

_(Blows. Timothy turns away and gropes toward wall.)_

_(She sings: Air, "Eileen Aroon.")_

"What if the days go wrong, When you can hear! What if the evening's long, You being near, I'll tell my troubles out, Put darkness to the rout And to the roundabout! Having your ear!"

_(Rock at door: sneezes. Mother drops bellows and goes. Timothy gives a cry, claps hands to ears and rushes out as if terrified.)_

_Rock: (Coming in seizes bellows.)_ Well now, didn't this turn to be very lucky and very good! The very thing I came looking for to be left there under my hands! _(Puts it hurriedly under coat.)_

_Flannery: (Coming in.)_ What are you doing here, James Rock?

_Rock_: What are you doing yourself?

_Flannery_: What is that in under your coat?

_Rock_: What's that to you?

_Flannery_: I'll know that when I see it.

_Rock_: What call have you to be questioning me?

_Flannery_: Open now your coat!

_Rock_: Stand out of my way!

_Flannery: (Suddenly tearing open coat and seizing bellows.)_ Did you think it was unknownst to me you stole the bellows?

_Rock_: Ah, what steal?

_Flannery_: Put it back in the place it was!

_Rock_: I will within three minutes.

_Flannery_: You'll put it back here and now.

_Rock: (Coaxingly.)_ Look at here now, Michael Flannery, we'll make a league between us. Did you ever see such folly as we're after seeing to-day? Sitting there for an hour and a half till that one settled the world upside down!

_Flannery_: If I did see folly, what I see now is treachery.

_Rock_: Didn't you take notice of the way that foolish old man is wasting and losing what was given him for to benefit mankind? A blast he has lost turning a pigeon to a crow, as if there wasn't enough in it before of that tribe picking the spuds out of the ridges. And another blast he has lost turning poor Celia, that was harmless, to be a holy terror of cleanness and a scold.

_Flannery_: Indeed, he'd as well have left her as she was. There was something very pleasing in her little sleepy ways.

_(Sings.)_

"But sad it is to see you so And to think of you now as an object of woe; Your Peggy'll still keep an eye on her beau. O Johnny, I hardly knew you!"

_Rock_: Bringing back to the memory of his mother every old grief and rancour. She that has a right to be making her peace with the grave!

_Flannery_: Indeed it seems he doesn't mind what he'll get so long as it's something that he wants.

_Rock_: Three blasts gone! And the world didn't begin to be cured.

_Flannery_: Sure enough he gave the bellows no fair play.

_Rock_: He has us made a fool of. He using it the way he did, he has us robbed.

_Flannery_: There's power in the four blasts left would bring peace and piety and prosperity and plenty to every one of the four provinces of Ireland.

_Rock_: That's it. There's no doubt but I'll make a better use of it than him, because I am a better man than himself.

_Flannery_: I don't know. You might not get so much respect in Dublin.

_Rock_: Dublin, where are you! What would I'd do going to Dublin? Did you never hear said the skin to be nearer than the shirt?

_Flannery_: What do you mean saying that?

_Rock_: The first one I have to do good to is myself.

_Flannery_: Is it that you would grab the benefit of the bellows?

_Rock_: In troth I will. I've got a hold of it, and by cripes I'll knock a good turn out of it.

_Flannery_: To rob the country and the poor for your own profit? You are a class of man that is gathering all for himself.

_Rock_: It is not worth while we to fall out of friendship. I will use but the one blast.

_Flannery_: You have no right or call to meddle with it.

_Rock_: The first thing I will meddle with is my own rick of turf. And I'll give you leave to go do the same with your own umbrella, or whatever property you may own.

_Flannery_: Sooner than be covetous like yourself I'd live and die in a ditch, and be buried from the Poorhouse!

_Rock_: Turf being black and light in the hand, and gold being shiny and weighty, there will be no delay in turning every sod into a solid brick of gold. I give you leave to do the same thing, and we'll be two rich men inside a half an hour!

_Flannery_: You are no less than a thief! _(Snatches at bellows.)_

_Rock_: Thief yourself. Leave your hand off it!

_Flannery_: Give it up here for the man that owns it!

_Rock_: You may set your coffin making for I'll beat you to the ground.

_Flannery: (As he clutches.)_ Ah, you have given it a shove. It has blown a blast on yourself!

_Rock_: Yourself that blew it on me! Bad cess to you! But I'll do the same bad turn upon you! _(Blows.)_

_Flannery_: There is some footstep without. Heave it in under the ashes.

_Rock_: Whist your tongue! _(Flings bellows behind hearth.)_

_(Conan comes in.)_

_Conan_: With all the chattering of women I have the train near lost. The car is coming for me and I'll make no delay now but to set out.

_(Sings.)_

"Oh the French are on the sea, Says the Sean Van Vocht, Oh the French are on the sea, Says the Sean Van Vocht,

Oh the French are in the bay, They'll be here without delay, And the Orange will decay, Says the Sean Van Vocht!"

Here now is my little pack. You were saying, Thomas Flannery, you would be lending me the loan of your umbrella.

_Flannery_: Ah, what umbrella? There's no fear of rain.

_Conan: (Taking it.)_ You to have proffered it I would not refuse it.

_Flannery: (Seizing it.)_ I don't know. I have to mind my own property. It might not serve it to be loaning it to this one and that. It might leave the ribs of it bare.

_Conan_: That's the way with the whole of ye. I to give you my heart's blood you'd turn me upside down for a pint of porter!

_Flannery_: I see no sense or charity in lending to another anything that might be of profit to myself.

_Conan_: Let you keep it so! That your ribs may be as bare as its own ribs that are bursting out through the cloth!

_Rock_: Do not give heed to him, Conan. There is in this bag _(takes it out)_ what will bring you every whole thing you might be wanting in the town. _(Takes out notes and gold and gives them.)_

_Conan_: It is only a small share I'll ask the lend of.

_Rock_: The lend of! No, but a free gift!

_Conan_: Well now, aren't you turned to be very kind? _(Takes notes.)_

_Rock_: Put that back in the bag. Here it is, the whole of it. Five and fifty pounds. Take it and welcome! It is yourself will make a good use of it laying it out upon the needy and the poor. Changing all for their benefit and their good! Oh, since St. Bridget spread her cloak upon the Curragh this is the most day and the happiest day ever came to Ireland.

_Conan: (Giving bag to Flannery.)_ Take it you, as is your due by what the mother said a while ago about the robbery he did on you in the time past.

_Flannery_: Give it here to me. I'll engage I'll keep a good grip on it from this out. It's long before any other one will get a one look at it!

_Conan_: There would seem to be a great change--and a sudden change come upon the two of ye. ..._(With a roar.)_ Where now is the bellows?

_Flannery: (Sulkily.)_ What way would I know?

_Conan: (Shaking him.)_ I know well what happened! It is _ye_ have stolen two of my blasts! Putting changes on yourselves ye would--much good may it do ye--. Thieving with your covetousness the last two nearly I had left!

_Rock: (Sulkily.)_ Leave your hand off me! I never stole no blast!

_Conan_: There's a bad class going through the world. The most people you will give to will be the first to cry you down. This was a wrong out of measure! Thieves ye are and pickpockets! Ye that were not worth changing from one to another, no more than you'd change a pinch of dust off the road into a puff of ashes. Stealing away my lovely blasts, bad luck to ye, the same as Prometheus stole the makings of a fire from the ancient gods!

_Flannery_: That is enough of keening and lamenting after a few blasts of barren wind--I'll be going where I have my own business to attend.

_Conan_: Where, so, is the bellows?

_Flannery_: How would I know?

_Conan_: The two of ye won't quit this till I'll find it! There is another two blasts in it that will bring sense and knowledge into Ireland yet!

_Rock_: Indeed they might bring comfort yet to many a sore heart!

_Conan: (Searching.)_ Where now is it? I couldn't find it if the earth rose up and swallowed it. Where now did I lay it down?

_Rock_: There's too much changes in this place for me to know where anything is gone.

_Conan: (At door.)_ Where are you, Maryanne! Celia! Timothy! Let ye come hither and search out my little bellows!

_(Timothy comes in, followed by Mother.)_

_Conan_: Hearken now, Timothy!

_Timothy: (Stopping his ears.)_ Speak easy, speak easy!

_Conan_: Take down now your fingers from your ears the way you will hear my voice!

_Timothy_: Have a care now with your screeching would you split the drum of my ear?

_Conan_: Is it that you have got your hearing?

_Timothy_: My hearing is it? As good as that I can hear a lie, and it forming in the mind.

_Conan_: Is that the truth you're saying?

_Timothy_: Hear, is it! I can hear every whisper in this parish and the seven parishes are nearest. And the little midges roaring in the air.--Let ye whist now with your sneezing in the draught!

_Conan_: This is surely the work of the bellows. Another blast gone!

_Rock_: So it would be too. Mostly the whole of them gone and spent. It's hard know in the morning what way will it be with you at night. _(Sings.)_

"I saw from the beach when the morning was shining A bark o'er the waters move gloriously on-- came when the sun o'er the beach was declining, The bark was still there, but the waters were gone."

_Timothy_: It is yourself brought the misfortune on me, calling your Druid spells into the house.

_Conan_: It is not upon you I ever turned it.

_Timothy_: You have a great wrong done to me!

_Mother_: It is glad you should be and happy.

_Timothy_; Happy, is it? Give me a hareskin cap for to put over my ears, having wool in it very thick! _(Sings.)_

"Silent, O Moyle, be the roar of thy water, Break not ye breezes your chain of repose, While murmuring mournfully Lir's lonely daughter Tells to the night-star her tale of woes.

"When shall the swan, her death-note singing, Sleep with wings in darkness furl'd? When will heaven its sweet bells ringing Call my spirit from this stormy world?"

_Mother_: Come with me now and I'll be chatting to you.

_Timothy_: Why would I be listening to your blather when I have the voices of the four winds to be listening to? The night wind, the east wind, the black wind and the wind from the south!

_Conan_: Such a thing I never saw before in all my natural life.

_Timothy_: To be hearing, without understanding it, the language of the tribes of the birds! (_Puts hands over ears again_.) There's too many sounds in the world! The sounds of the earth are terrible! The roots squeezing and jostling one another through the clefts, and the crashing of the acorn from the oak. The cry of the little birdeen in under the silence of the hawk!

_Conan:_ (_To Mother_.) As it you let it loose upon him, let you bring him away to some hole or cave of the earth.

_Timothy_: It is my desire to go cast myself in the ocean where there'll be but one sound of its waves, the fishes in its meadows being dumb! (_Goes to corner and hides his head in a sack_.)

_Mother_: Even so there might likely be a mermaid playing reels on her silver comb, and yourself craving after the world you left. (_Sings: Air, "Spailpin Fanach_.")

"You think to go from every woe to peace in the wide ocean, But you will find your foolish mind repent its foolish notion. When dog-fish dash and mermaids splash their finny tails to find you, I'll make a bet that you'll regret the world you left behind you!"

_Celia:_ (_Clattering in with broom, etc_.) What are ye doing, coming in this room again after I having it settled so nice? I'll allow no one in the place again, only carriage company that will have no speck of dust upon the sole of their shoe!

_Mother_: Oh, Celia, there has strange things happened!

_Celia_: What I see strange is that some person has meddled with that hill of ashes on the hearth and set it flying athrough the air. Is it hens ye are wishful to be, that would be searching and scratching in the dust for grains? And this thrown down in the midst! (_Holds up bellows_.)

_Conan_: Give me my bellows!

_Mother_: No, but give it to me!

_Rock and Flannery_: Give it to myself!

_Timothy:_ (_Looking up, with hands on ears_.) My curse upon it and its work. Little I care if it goes up with the clouds.

_Celia_: What in the world wide makes the whole of ye so eager to get hold of such a thing?

_Conan_: It has but the one blast left! (_Sings_.)

"'Tis the last Rose of Summer Left blooming alone, All her lovely companions Are faded and gone. No flower of her kindred, No rosebud is nigh, To reflect back her blushes Or give sigh for sigh!"

_Celia_: What are you fretting about blasts and about roses?

_Rock:_ It has a charm on it--

_Flannery:_ To change the world--

_Mother:_ That chedang myself--

_Conan:_ For the worse--

_Mother:_ And Timothy--

_Conan:_ For the worse--

_Rock:_ Myself and Flannery--

_Conan:_ For the worse, for the worse--

_Mother:_ Conan that changed yourself with it--

_Conan:_ For the very worst!

_Celia:_ (_To Conan_.) Is it riddles, or is it that you put a spell and a change upon me?

_Conan:_ If I did, it was for your own good!

_Celia:_ Do you call it for my good to set me running till I have my toes going through my shoes? (_Holds them out_.)

_Conan:_ I didn't think to go that length.

_Celia:_ To roughen my hands with soap and scalding water till they're near as knotted and as ugly as your own!

_Conan:_ Ah, leave me alone! I tell you it is not by my own fault. My plan and my purpose that went astray and that broke down.

_Celia:_ I will not leave you till you'll change me back to what I was. What way can these hands go to the dance house to-night? Change me back, I say!

_Rock:_ And me--

_Timothy:_ And myself, that I'll have quiet in my head again.

_Conan:_ I cannot undo what has been done. There is no back way.

_Timothy:_ Is there no way at all to come out of it safe and sane?

_Conan:_ (_Shakes head_.) Let ye make the best of it.

_Flannery: (Sings.) (Air, "I saw from the Beach.")_

"Ne'er tell me of glories serenely adorning The close of our day, the calm eve of our night. Give me back, give me back the wild freshness of morning, Her clouds and her tears are worth evening's best light."

_Mother: (Who has bellows in her hand.)_ Stop! Stop--my mind is travelling backward ...so far I can hardly reach to it ...but I'll come to it ...the way I'll be changed to what I was before, and the town and the country wishing me well, I having got my enough of unfriendly looks and hard words!

_Timothy:_ Hurry on, Ma'am, and remember, and take the spell off the whole of us.

_Mother:_ I am going back, back, to the longest thing that is in my mind and my memory!... I myself a child in my mother's arms the very day I was christened....

_Conan:_ Ah, stop your raving!

_Mother:_ Songs and storytelling, and my old generations laying down news of this spell that is now come to pass....

_Rock:_ Did they tell what way to undo the charm?

_Mother:_ You have but to turn the bellows the same as the smith would turn the anvil, or St. Patrick turned the stone for fine weather ... and to blow a blast ...and a twist will come inside in it and the charm will fall off with that blast, and undo the work that has been done!

_All:_ Turn it so! (_Cats look over, playing on fiddles "O Johnny, I hardly knew you," while mother blows on each_.)

_Timothy:_ Ha! (_Takes hands from ears and puts one behind his ear_.)

_Rock:_ Ha! Where now is my bag? (_Turns out his pockets, unhappy to find them empty_.)

_Flannery:_ Ha! (_Smiles and holds out umbrella to Conan, who takes it_.)

_Mother: (To Celia.)_ Let you blow a blast on me. (_Celia does so_.) Now it's much if I can remember to blow a blast backward upon yourself!

_Celia:_ Stop a minute! Leave what is in me of life and of courage till I will blow the last blast is in the bellows upon Conan.

_Conan:_ Stop that! Do you think to change and to crow over me. You will not or I'll lay my curse upon you, unless you would change me into an eagle would be turning his back upon the whole of ye, and facing to his perch upon the right hand of the master of the gods!

_Celia:_ Is it to waste the last blast you would? Not at all. As we burned the candle we'll burn the inch! I'll not make two halves of it, I'll give it to you entirely!

_Conan:_ You will not, you unlucky witch of illwill! (_Protects himself with umbrella_.)

_Celia: (Having got him to a corner.)_ Let you take things quiet and easy from this out, and be as content as you have been contrary from the very day and hour of your birth! _(She blows upon him and he sits down smiling. Mother blows on Celia, and she sits down in first attitude_.)

_Celia:_ (_Taking up pigeon_.) Oh, there you are come back my little dove and my darling! (_Sings: "Shule Aroon."_)

"Come sit and settle on my knee And I'll tell you and you'll tell me A tale of what will never be, Go-dé-tóu-Mavourneen slan!"

_Conan:_ (_Lighting pipe_.) So the dove is there, too. Aristotle said there is nothing at the end but what there used to be at the beginning. Well now, what a pleasant day we had together, and what good neighbours we all are, and what a comfortable family entirely.

_Rock:_ You would seem to have done with your complaints about the universe, and your great plan to change it overthrown.

_Conan:_ Not a complaint! What call have I to go complaining? The world is a very good world, the best nearly I ever knew. (_Sings_.)

"O, a little cock sparrow he sat on a tree, O, a little cock sparrow he sat on a tree, O, a little cock sparrow he sat on a tree, And he was as happy as happy could be, With a chirrup, a chirrup, a chirrup!

"A chirrup, a chirrup, a chirrup! A chirrup, a chirrup, a chirrup! A chirrup, a chirrup, a chirrup! A chirrup, a chirrup, a----!"

CURTAIN

NOTE TO ARISTOTLE'S BELLOWS

I had begun to put down some notes for this play when in the autumn of 1919 I was suddenly obliged (through the illness and death of the writer who had undertaken it) to take in hand the writing of the "Life and Achievement" of my nephew Hugh Lane, and this filled my mind and kept me hard at work for a year.

When the proofs were out of my hands I turned with but a vague recollection to these notes, and was surprised to find them fuller than they had appeared in my memory, so that the idea was rekindled and the writing was soon begun. And I found a certain rest and ease of mind in having turned from a long struggle (in which, alas, I had been too often worsted) for exactitude in dates and names and in the setting down of facts, to the escape into a world of fantasy where I could create my own. And so before the winter was over the play was put in rehearsal at the Abbey Theatre, and its first performance was on St. Patrick's Day, 1921.

I have been looking at its first scenario, made according to my habit in rough pen and ink sketches, coloured with a pencil blue and red, and the changes from that early idea do not seem to have been very great, except that in the scene where Conan now hears the secret of the hiding-place of the Spell from the talk of the cats, the Bellows had been at that time left beside him by a dwarf from the rath, in his sleep. The cats work better, and I owe their success to the genius of our Stage Carpenter, Mr. Sean Barlow, whose head of the Dragon from my play of that name had been such a masterpiece that I longed to see these other enchanted heads from his hand.

The name of the play in that first scenario was "The Fault-Finder," but my cranky Conan broke from that narrowness. If the play has a moral it is given in the words of the Mother, "It's best make changes little by little, the same as you'd put clothes upon a growing child." The restlessness of the time may have found its way into Conan's mind, or as some critic wrote, "He thinks of the Bellows as Mr. Wilson thought of the League of Nations," and so his disappointment comes. As A.E. writes in "The National Being," "I am sympathetic with idealists in a hurry, but I do not think the world can be changed suddenly by some heavenly alchemy, as St. Paul was smitten by a light from the overworld. Though the heart in us cries out continually, 'Oh, hurry, hurry to the Golden Age,' though we think of revolutions, we know that the patient marshalling of human forces is wisdom.... Not by revolutions can humanity be perfected. I might quote from an old oracle, 'The gods are never so turned away from man as when he ascends to them by disorderly methods.' Our spirits may live in the Golden Age but our bodily life moves on slow feet, and needs the lantern on the path and the staff struck carefully into the darkness before us to see that the path beyond is not a morass, and the light not a will o' the wisp." (But this may not refer to our own Revolution, seeing that has been making a step now and again towards what many judged to be a will o' the wisp through over seven hundred years.)

As to the machinery of the play, the spell was first to have been worked by a harp hung up by some wandering magician, and that was to work its change according to the wind, as it blew from north or south, east or west. But that would have been troublesome in practice, and the Bellows having once entered my mind, brought there I think by some scribbling of the pencil that showed Conan protecting himself with an umbrella, seemed to have every necessary quality, economy, efficiency, convenience.

As to Aristotle, his name is a part of our folklore. The old wife of one of our labourers told me one day, as a bee buzzed through the open door: "Aristotle of the Books was very wise but the bees got the better of him in the end. He wanted to know how did they pack the comb, and he wasted the best part of a fortnight watching them, and he could not see them doing it. Then he made a hive with a glass cover on it and put it over them, and he thought to watch them. But when he went to put his eye to the glass, they had it all covered with wax so that it was as black as the pot, and he was as blind as before. He said he was never rightly killed till then. The bees had him beat that time surely." And Douglas Hyde brought home one day a story from Kilmacduagh bog, in which Aristotle took the place of Solomon, the Wise Man in our tales as well as in those of the East. And he said that as the story grew and the teller became more familiar, the name of Aristotle was shortened to that of Harry.

As to the songs they are all sung to the old Irish airs I give at the end.

A. GREGORY.

August 18, 1921.

THE JESTER

A PLAY IN THREE ACTS

FOR RICHARD

January, 1919

A.G.

PERSONS

_The Five Princes_.

_The Five Wrenboys_.

_The Guardian of the Princes and Governor of the Island_.

_The Servant_.

_The Two Dowager Messengers_.

_The Ogre_.

_The Jester_.

_Two Soldiers_.

_The Scene is laid in The Island of Hy Brasil, that appears every seven years_.

_Time: Out of mind_.