“Obvious and drowsy it might seem, but once he went ashore, the swarming, teeming life of it struck Shane like a current of air. Along the quays, along the Cannebière, was a riot of color and nationality unbelievable from aboard ship. Here were Turks, dignified and shy. Here were Greeks, wary, furtive. Here were Italians, Genoese, Neapolitans, Livornians, droll, vivacious, vindictive. Here were Moors, here were Algerians, black African folk, sneering, inimical. Here were Spaniards, with their walk like a horse’s lope. Here were French business men, very important. Here were Provencals, cheery, short, tubby, excitable, olive-colored, black-bearded, calling to one another in the _langue d’oc_ of the troubadors, _’Te, mon bon! Commoun as? Quezaco?_” There is that same sense of seeing things in the glamorous description of the Syrian city where Shane lived with the Arab girl he had married; and in the hasty outline of Buenos Aires: “Here now was a city growing rich, ungracefully--a city of arrogant Spanish colonists, of poverty-stricken immigrants, of down-trodden lower classes ... a city of riches ... a city of blood.... Here mud, here money.... Into a city half mud hovels, half marble-fronted houses, gauchos drove herd upon herd of cattle, baffled, afraid. Here Irish drove streams of gray bleating sheep. Here ungreased bullock carts screamed. From the bluegrass pampas they drove them, where the birds sang and waters rippled, where was the gentleness of summer rain, where was the majesty of great storms.... And by their thousands and their tens of thousands they drove them into Buenos Aires, and slew them for their hides....” That was the Buenos Aires of Shane’s day, in the Victorian era; but in essentials it was probably as Donn Byrne saw it. For when he was about twenty-two he quitted Ireland and went back to America, and presently made his way to Buenos Aires to get married. His wife is the well-known dramatist Dolly Byrne who wrote with the actress Gilda Varesi, the delightful comedy “Enter Madam,” which has had long runs in London and in New York. It was during this second sojourn in the States that Donn Byrne settled down seriously to literary work. He says he began by contributing to American magazines some of the world’s worst poetry, which he has never collected into a volume; but he is given to talking lightly of his own doings and you cannot take him at his own valuation. One of the poems, at least, on the San Francisco earthquake, appropriately enough, made something of a noise and was reprinted in the _United Irishman_, but Ireland had not then become such a furious storm-center and an earthquake was still enough to excite it. Before long he was making a considerable reputation with his short stories, and a collection of these, “Stories Without Heroes,” was his first book.