But the frontier town, like all frontier towns in a country that has been much fought over, keeps an intense, militant, and aggressive character. Derry stands for the extreme type of Protestant assertion--oddly enough, for in the beginning of its history, it was the monastic seat, Doire Coluimchille, "Columba's Oakgrove", to which that great apostle of Christianity looked back from his mission overseas--"thinking long" in Iona for-- "Derry mine, my own oakgrove, Little cell, my home, my love". There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of that Irish poem, transmitted in ancient manuscript, which a scholar has thus translated--Columba's lyric cry towards the Ireland which he had left. Yet, after all, the new is more to us than the old, and Derrymen have good right to be proud of Derry walls. The famous siege was a great event, the resistance was indeed heroic, though I think that popular fame has selected the wrong man to be the centre of hero-worship. A tall column which rises from the walls behind the bishop's palace is Walker's monument, and Walker was no soldier but an elderly, loquacious, and somewhat vain, preacher. If contemporary records are any safe guide, the true organizer and inspirer of that long resistance was Murray--whose fame, I am glad to say, is kept alive by a Murray club. Yet the man who best of all, perhaps, deserves commemoration has no memorial in Derry. The siege had lasted from April 18, and on June 13 the town was already starving when a fleet was sighted in Lough Foyle. Kirke, who commanded it, lay outside, intimidated by the defences of the narrow channel. So it went on for six weeks; but there was at least one Derry man with the fleet who could brook the delay no longer. This was Captain Browning, of the _Mountjoy_, and he insisted that attempts should be made to run the batteries and to break the boom, whose site is still preserved in the name "Boom Hall". The _Mountjoy_ was a merchant-man, and another, the _Phoenix_, of Coleraine, joined the venture, and a frigate was sent with them to help in drawing the enemy's fire. The _Mountjoy_, with Browning himself at the helm, headed straight for the boom under full sail, struck it, and with the impact the boom gave. But the shock caused a rebound which flung the ship back on a mudbank, and at the same moment Browning was shot down at his post. The _Phoenix_ had slipped already through the gap and was away with her full cargo of meal. Boats were out from the forts to seize the _Mountjoy_; but she fired a broadside, and the recoil lifted her off the bank, and she too slipped through, carrying the body of her dying skipper to the wharf of the city which his courage and determination had rescued from famine and from enforced surrender. Life stayed in him long enough to let him hear the cries of welcome, to know that the goal was reached, the blockade broken, and his city saved, before the rush of blood from