her, but that it must have been at nearly about that time, as she did not think she had slept for much over an hour.

Perhaps this is even more strange.

A lady living in Ireland had an Irish terrier of which she was very fond. A few winters ago she and her husband went abroad, leaving the dog in the charge of the servants. Some months lated the dog appeared very restless, and one day it cried and howled in a most unaccountable manner. No notice was taken of it, but a few days later the household were informed that their mistress had died in Italy after a few days' illness on the same day, and approximately at the same hour, as the dog had howled so distressingly. The news of their mistress's death was quite unexpected, as none of the household even knew that she was ill.

To those who believe that at the hour of death the released spirit can, and often does, revisit persons or places that have been much in its thoughts during the last hours of life, an explanation of this apparent mystery offers no difficulty. Miss L.'s aunt had been thinking much of the invalid and had inquired for her only a few hours before she died, and it is reasonable to suppose that a sick person far away from her home would think much of it and of the favourite

dog that she had left there. Those who do not agree with this solution of the mystery must solve the problem for themselves. In both cases, however, it was the dog that, with its clearer vision, saw and recognized the supernatural.

So far, all that I have written has been gathered from personal friends. I have, however, read many anecdotes which go far to prove that the psychic instinct is more fully developed in animals, more especially in dogs (and perhaps horses), than in ourselves; but this, taken from a newspaper whose date I have forgotten, is worth recording. It is headed 'Dog saves Woman's Life.'

'A young lady living in Preston was awakened in the morning by a dog whining and scratching at her bedroom door. She went to the kitchen to see if anything was the matter, and had just got there when a part of the building of the adjacent house fell in and crashed through the roof on to the bed upon which she had been lying.' I have heard similar stories, but do not consider them sufficiently well authenticated to quote. Enough has been given to support the belief that animals have the gift of 'seeing things' that we do not see, or, in the words of the late Mrs. Alexander,

For beast and bird have seen and heard That which man knoweth not.

IT is not necessary to have been born in Sussex to become a Sussex - poet. You need only have the South Saxon character so well suggested in John Taylor's couplet:

To hear much, to say little, and do less,
Are great preservatives of quietness

and the required faculty of rhythm and reason to qualify as a poet-lover of the county with the most lovable scenery in England-little rivers with forget-me-not growing everywhere along their winding banks, deep watermeadows full of drowsy kine, and high-columned woodland sanctuaries, Romney Marsh "just riddle with diks and sluices, an' tide-gates an' waterlets," and, above all, the Downs, the gentlest uplands in the world, that seem to be the very bosom of Mother Earth. Romney Marsh, when the sil

near Fittleworth or used to be) and see their golden dancing:

And whoever walks along there Stops short and sees,

By the moist tree-roots

In a clearing of the trees, Yellow great battalions of them Blowing in the breeze.

Let others love the Downs best (not me, for I hate hill climbing) and recall them with the passion in Elizabeth Browning's lines:

My own hills! Are you 'ware of me, my hills,

How I burn toward you? Do you feel tonight

The urgency and yearning of my soul
As sleeping mothers feel the suckling babe
And smile? . . . . Still ye go

Your own determined, calm, indifferent way

Toward sunrise, shade by shade, and light by light.

But I honour their gentle beauty by eating the mutton praised by Dudeney, Mr. Kipling's old shepherd: 'That's Southdown thyme which makes our Southdown mutton beyond compare, and my mother told me 'twill cure anything except broken hearts or necks, I forget which' . . . As I was going to say before these passages insisted on being quoted, some of the poets who have written most beautifully about Sussex were born far beyond its green or grey horizons. Mr. Kipling and Mr. Hilaire Belloc are not Sussex men save by adoption; neither was Swinburne nor Tennyson, with his fair prospect of 'Green Sussex fading into blue, With one grey

And we assault in an hour, and it's a silly thing:

I can't forget the lane that goes from
Steyning to the Ring.

Let me pass over the famous Sussex poets (among them Jasper Mayne, made Archdeacon of Chichester at the Restoration, who had the sombre intensity of Donne at times), and look at the little anthology of young singers and makers in the Poetry Review. Alas! that it is impossible to quote them all. The various aspects of Sussex scenery are praised in golden -numbers; not so Brighton, which is

Can there be yet a still more lovely thing Than this steep street in the grey Georgian town,

So steep it reaches halfway to the sky, Having been once a sheep-track on a Down?

It is the Downs, however, that dominate each song of life or love or death, and so let us close on a heavenly cadence with this epigram:

O green, translucent Downs!
Soft-shadowed, lifted high!
What magic fills you, that you stand,
Untouched by Time's relentless hand,
As God first breathed you on the morn-
ing sky?

PERHAPS it was because, the night before, a gay laddo had whistled at the Widow Healy as he passed her on the road, and, when she looked back at

him, had blown her an impertinent kiss; or maybe it was the glory-flare of the gorse which glimmered through the dusk that night and spoke to her of the yellow sunshine of life; or else it was the reminiscent scent of the gorse which put back the clock of her mind to her courting days with Healy in that very lane. Whatever it was, after an hour of steady reflection she raised a defiant head, and with one shake of her shoulders shook off the weight of forty dull years from her shawl, and with it her twenty years' record of sobriety in Ballybeg. She

decided that twenty good years of her life had been wasted without courters, and that courters, therefore, she must have.

It was perhaps unfortunate, if not untypical of widows, that her premonitory choice fell on a 'promised' boy. It was partly that her instinct sensed a flaw of softness in James Hickey; partly that between herself and Delia Meahan, his promised wife, there had always existed an obscure competitive dislike.

So she kept her door open of an evening till that hour when young Hickey was passing by alone. Mrs. Healy had cut her finger deeply the day before, and as James lunged heavily toward her, the very flower of ingenuity bloomed suddenly in her

closely shawled head, and she tore off the sticking rag with such force that the wound bled freshly again.

'Och!' she called out at the top of her voice. 'I have the top cut off of me finger with a p'isoned traycle tin, and how will I hold it on?'

At that, James Hickey lunged into the house, the big lump of goodnatured softness that he was. But, as the widow stooped and tore a rag from her petticoat, at the sight of the blood he sickened and turned away.

'You'll get the lock-jars with the dint of the p'isoned gore, ma'am.' James said faintly, and sat down trembling, on a chair.

'An ye'll set down on' watch me gettin' 'em, is it?' the widow railed with.

coquetry at him. Soon, James Hickey was stirring a sugary cup of her tea, and what could he do but fall in with her chat and go on nodding his head?

'And do you cross yourself, now, when you do be meeting her first thing of a morning?' she continued in her railing voice.

'Why would I do that, ma'am?' James Hickey asked.

'Did you never hear tell them redhaired girls is awfully unlucky?' Mrs. Healy cried, setting the small shawl she always wore upon her head more closely round her face. She clapped down a faded photograph beside his cup, and continued, standing over him, her hands upon her hips.

'Look at that for a lovely boy!' said Mrs. Healy, 'God help us!-he had a red-haired wife, and whatever he'd set about would go bandy on him, whether his cows'd slip a calf, or he'd get an odd gripe every day, or what, till he wandered the whole of Ireland to try could he get shut of her, and she always after him, till he set his heart on meself; and when he heard I was a wedded wife, he thr'un himself in the

duck-pond, and when they took him out, there was yards of green duckweed and a drake's fedder in his hair.'

James Hickey rose, and went unsteadily to the door. "That was a frightful thing!-'t would give you the creeps!' he said.

"T would so!' said Mrs. Healy, 'and if you loves them kind of stories, James, come back to me some evenin' and I'll tell you more.'

And when James was gone, the widow was filled with a glorious surprise that she had cut so deep a notch in his credulity, and that the craft of putting the 'Come-hither' on a man still welled up freshly in her practised heart. 'But now,' said she to

herself, 'what good is in one? I should

get two or three, for to make the first come on!'

So, presently, it went all round Ballybeg that young Hickey never crossed Delia's door these times, and that himself, and old McSweeney, and Johnnie deCourcy were always going up to Mrs. Healy's place, and that they were all saying there wasn't a finer woman in it than what Mrs. And as to Delia Meahan, Healy was.

it was a pity for her, but it was true for James, what he was saying-Delia had no luck.

Then Delia followed John deCourcy one dark night, as he went up the widow's lane with something in his hand, and old McSweeney joined him, with a swaying bucket in his grip, and last of all James Hickey joined the two and all went into the widow's house.

'Look at here, ma'm!' said young deCourcy, opening his red handkerchief, out of which fell pellets of dark mold. 'I have brought you a fern for your winder. I dug it out o' the side of the mountain stream.'