pounds a year, and which is situated in a crofting-parish.  Every such crofter is to have security of tenure so long as he pays his rent and complies with certain other conditions; his rent is to be fixed by an official valuer or by arbitration, if he and his landlord cannot agree in regard to it; he is to have compensation, on quitting his holding, for all his improvements which are suitable for the holding; and his heirs may inherit his interests, although he may not sell or assign them.  Such propositions seem radical and calculated to interfere greatly with proprietary rights and the freedom of contract.  They are, however, but little more than statements of the customs that already exist on some of the best estates.  Just as the government by the Irish Land Law Act (1881) took up the Ulster tenant-right customs, gave them the force of law, and extended them to all Ireland, it is proposed by this bill to give the sanction of law to those customary rights which the crofters claim to have inherited from former generations, and which have long been conceded by some of the landlords.

Such a measure of relief will not make all the crofters contented and prosperous.  It will, however, give them security against being turned out of their homes and against excessively high rents, and will encourage them to spend their labor and money in improving their holdings.  If some assistance could be given to those who may wish to emigrate from overcrowded districts, and if the government would make liberal advances of money to promote the fishing industry, the prospect that the discontent and destitution would disappear would be much better.  The relief proposed will, however, be thankfully received by many of the crofters and their friends.

     DAVID BENNETT KING.

MY FRIEND GEORGE RANDALL.

Since his own days at the university George Randall had always had a friend or two among the students who came after him.  I remember how in my Freshman year I used to see Tom Wayward going up the stairs in the Academy of Music building to his office, and how I used to envy Billy Wylde when I met him arm in arm with George on one of the campus malls.  It was occasionally whispered about that Randall’s influence on these young men was not of the very best, and that he used to have a never-empty bottle of remarkably smooth whiskey in his closet, along with old letter-files and brief-books; and it is undoubtedly true that Perry Tomson and I used to consider George’s friends as models in the manner of smoking a pipe, or ordering whiskey-and-soda at Bertrand’s to give us an appetite for our mutton-chops or our bifteck aux pommes, and in the delightful self-sufficiency with which in the pleasant spring days they would cut recitations and loll on the grass smoking cigarettes right under the nose, almost, of the professor.  But they are both married now, and settled down to respectable conventional success; and Billy Wylde,