BOOK NOTICES

New Zealand Tablet, 13 March 1919, Page 39

BOOK NOTICES

Pinny of the Doorstep, by K. E. Purdon. (Talbot Press, 6s net.) The north side of Dublin has a mystery and -a romance that no other city in the world can claim. As one walks among the tall brick houses around Mountjoy Square another world is evoked and the ghosts of the dead are near. Over a century ago the Irish aristocracy had their town houses in the north side. The old, bad landlords, the good old Norman families, the men and women whose ancestors had plundered the Irish people came here in the season and passed in and out at those high doorways; and there was movement and magnificence in the streets that are now like those of a dead town. These were the homes of those who pushed aside The broken children of a sweeter race: These are the cast-off garments of their pride Because of whom a thousand heroes died Alien and sinister, these hold their place. The light has died upon the pavements grey, From shattered windows and from blackened door Where, in a. sunny, heartless yesterday Silken and jewelled beauty was at play, Stare out the hopeless faces of the poor. Alas! those once proud, mansions are now the notorious tenement, houses in which the Dublin poor are crowded like rabbits in their warrens—homes that are no homes, shelters from wind and weather that are a danger to life, and to morals which are more than life. Yet, in the rooms, so dingy, so dilapidated now, there are frequently found men aud women and children •whos'e native nobility and innocence no environment could tarnish, pure Irish souls that are more beautiful before God than the well-dressed men and the fair ladies whose ghosts still haunt the passages and stairs. Miss Purdon tells us the story of a little group of dwellers in a Dublin tenement: Dinny of the Doorstep, his improvident father, his cruel step-mother, his young sister, and a few friends who looked in on their lives and pitied them. Dinny is a little Irish street-arab, patient and long-suffering, innocent and lovable ; Bride his sistermothers him and protects him in a child's unselfish way, with a fierce protecting hungry love for the poor, weak little boy who has nobody else to love him in the wide world. A kindly old woman who makes a living by selling apples. does what in her lies to make up for the neglect of the father and the cruelty of. the step-mother. . A Dublin doctor's daughter befriends them and takes an interest in their lives which is not always as helpful as benevolent. Out of such material Miss Purdon weaves a beautiful story, full of pathos, real, palpitating with life. She has made the figures and the background stand out on her pages like pictures. She has given us the lives of those children God's poor all its sadness. But she has missed one thing: the religion which enables the Irish poor to endure as they do such hardships as she depicts in this novel. The gentleness and the innate-courtesy, of the Irish poor—that old-world quality which awaked the wonder of Mr. Balfour— felt in every page of the book; and it is a pity that Miss Purdon misses the radical cause of it all. Perhaps the reason is that she is not of the same faith as the Irish poor, and that while she sees the effects the cause is hidden from her. Here and there in the story one comes upon a construction and a turn of phrase that makes one pause and re-read with an eye to meaning and grammar. No human work is perfect, however; and these faults notwithstanding, Miss Purdon has given us a book to read with interest and appreciation. It is a sincere, truthful study of the humble, beautiful lives of two of the little waifs that dwell in the deserted marble halls which once re-echoed to the wild revelry of the men at whose doors must be laid the poverty and suffering of so many Irish children to-da""'. - - ..' ~ ■