=Goon and bans.= Gown and bands,—clerical robes. THE DÀN-NAN-RÒN By FIONA MACLEOD Are there strange, mystical forces in the world that affect us in spite of ourselves? Or do our own actions rebound upon us and make life “heaven or hell” as the case may be? These questions that we ask when we read _Macbeth_ come to us when we read Fiona Macleod’s _Dàn-Nan-Ròn_. _The Dàn-Nan-Ròn_ is not wholly a story of mysticism built on the idea that the weird flute-“song o’ the seals” could so thrill one who, perhaps, drew his ancestry from the seals, that he would go out into the wild waters to live or die with his ancestral folk. The story suggests all that. It hints at strange descent, magic melodies, wraiths of the dead, and weird powers beyond man. This, no doubt, combined with unusual setting, frequent use of the little-understood Gaelic, weirdly musical verse, and romantic action, gives the story an unusual atmosphere of gloom and shadow. At heart, in plain fact, the story is psychological. A man on whose soul hangs the memory of a crime, maddened by grief at the death of a fervently loved wife, tormented in his evil hour by a deadly human foe who subtly, with compelling music, plays upon his superstitions, plunges, in the violence of his madness, into the sea. From that point of view the man’s own soul scourged him to his death. The whole combination of weird atmosphere, tragedy, grief, conscience, and superstition, is brought together in an artistic form that leads to a grimly startling catastrophe—the final mad fight with the seals. This is no common story of sensational event. It is a great human tragedy of grief and conscience, played to the weird music of the north as if by a Gaelic minstrel endowed with mystic powers. There is something mystic indeed in Fiona Macleod. William Sharp, 1856-1905, the Scottish poet, editor, novelist, biographer, and critic, lived a successful life as man of letters. He did more, for, beginning in 1894, he used the name, “Fiona Macleod,” not as a pseudonym but as that of the actual author of the most unusual, brilliant, and altogether original series of poems and stories ever written. Not until Mr. Sharp’s death was it found that Fiona Macleod and William Sharp were one and the same person. The whole story is apparently one of dual personality. All this adds to the strange fascination of Fiona Macleod’s stories and poems. =Eilanmore.= An island west of Scotland. =The Outer Isles.= The Hebrides, or Western Isles, west of Scotland. =The Lews and North Uist.= Islands of the Hebrides. =Arran.= An island west of Ireland. =Inner Hebrides.= Islands of the Hebrides group, not far from the coast of Scotland. =Runes.= Mystical songs.