None the less does the tale, some years after that first keen greedy gulping of its delights, and after a more leisured third reading, remain a very fine and beautiful strange book. I sincerely hope you are familiar with it: even if you are not, here is no need for me to summarize this tale of how young Marco Polo, loitering through youth's amiable adulteries in thirteenth century Venice, became enamored, through report, of the Khan of Tartary's daughter, and of his adventuring as he crossed Asia to win to her. It suffices to report that here, in brief, we have a variant of the old high tale of Geoffrey Rudel and his Far Princess, adorned with very vivid, curious ornament, and brought to a dénouement no less sad but more soul-contenting. Yet the essential thing about this book, I thought at my first reading, was its prodigality in the transforming magic which--heaven knows, in how few books!--quite incommunicably lends romantic beauty to this or that not necessarily unusual or fertile theme, somewhat as sunset tinges the wooded and the barren mountain with equal glamour. To me this book at once exposed Donn Byrne as a practitioner of that rare and unteachable wizardry without which one writes only words, and without which the most carefully made sentences tend but to bury one another like neat undertakers. Technically, though, the construction of _Messer Marco Polo_ must remain always to any novelist peculiarly interesting. To Mr. Byrne, in Westchester, N.Y., "at the second check of the hunt, came the message that a countryman and a clansman needed me," in the person of Malachi Campbell of the Long Glen: and it is the old Celt who tells of what, in a far-off golden yesterday, Marco Polo the Venetian saw and encountered in Cataia. So then does Mr. Byrne set about his magicking, to lure you from the prosaic to the wonderful, at last to leave you contentedly cuddled in the lap of the incredible. He raises for you, to begin, the milieu of his Westchester,--"the late winter grass, sparse, scrofulous, the jerry-built bungalows, the lines of uncomely linen, the blatant advertising boards." It is in, seen through, and continuously colored by, this almost Gopher Prairean atmosphere that Malachi evokes the old time and the great plenty of Ireland in the days of her championship, and the gleaming world of tall Dermot and Granye of the Bright Breasts and amorous fierce Maeve and Cuchulain in whose heroic looks were love and fire; and evokes too, seen as if beyond and colored by the glow of this Celtic wonderland, not merely the opulent sleek life of the heyday and prime of Venice, "that for riches and treasures was the wonder of the world"; since past even that, illuminate and tinged by all, is evoked also the Venetian's notion of the inscrutable, good-tempered, shining, evil East.