There is a general idea that he is an American; unless an author stops at home mistakes of that kind are sure to happen. People take it for granted that he belongs where he happens to be living when they find him. Henry James had lived among us so long that he was quite commonly taken for an Englishman even before he became naturalized during the War. The same fate is overtaking Ezra Pound; he is the chief writer of a sort of poetry that is being largely written in his country and in ours, and because he has made his home with us for many years he is generally regarded here as a native. On the other hand, Richard Le Gallienne left us and has passed so large a part of his life in the United States that most of us are beginning to think of him as an American. The mistake is perhaps more excusable in the case of Donn Byrne, for he was born at New York in 1889, but before he was three months old he was brought over to Ireland which ought to have been his birthplace, since his father was an architect there. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and when he was not improving his mind was developing his muscles; he went in enthusiastically for athletics, and in his time held the light-weight boxing championships for Dublin University and for Ulster. He knows all about horses, too, and can ride with the best, and has manifested a more than academic interest in racing. In fact, he has taken a keen interest in whatever was going on in the life around him wherever he has been, and he has been about the world a good deal, and turned his hand to many things. There is something Gallic as well as Gaelic in his wit, his vivacity, his swiftly varying moods. He is no novelist who has done all his traveling in books and dug up his facts about strange countries in a reference library. When he deals with ships his characters are not such as keep all the while in the saloon cabin; they are the ship’s master and the sailors, and you feel there is a knowledge of the sea behind them when he gets them working; and if he had not been an athlete himself he could not have described with such vigor and realistic gusto that great fight between Shane Campbell and the wrestler from Aleppo in “The Wind Bloweth.” How much of personal experience has gone into his novels is probably more than he could say himself. But when he is picturing any place that his imaginary people visit, you know from a score of casual, intimate touches that he, too, has been there, and is remembering it while he writes. Take this vivid sketch of Marseilles, for example: