A NAVVY POET.

Working as a navvy on a repair gang on the Caledonian railway between Greenock and Wemyss Bay there is a young Irishman .who has been a manual labourer since he left school-at the age of twelve, and yet has had'timo to cultivate no inconsiderable, degree of literary taste,'and even to ivnte and publish a small. volume of - his own poetry. The "Glasgow News" gives some particulars of the man, ,Mac(4ill by name, and his book. The'latter cannot be. bought in any shop,, but is sold by tho poet himself in his'sparo time. It is entitled "Gleanings : frqm a Navvy's' Scrapbook." Ma'cGlll is a nztive of Ulster, and is; little over twenty years of age. ' ' '';.••' "Tho fact that everything; has been said about everything does not naturally suggest that everything has been sung about everything," Mac Gill remarks in the introduction to his booklet. And the circumstances under which his verso is written aro indicated in the same introduction. "I bono you' will have more plteuY<DiMr£iHih^ti£6'o r verses than I have had in writing some of them. Imagino a navvy's hut; fill it with men shaggy, as hoarse dressed in moleskin and leather, reeking of beer and tobacco. In a dark corner of the hut aforesaid, place your humble servant scribbling for dear life on a notebook as black as bis Satanic Majesty, while on one side a trio of experts in. fisticuffs discuss tho Johnson-Jeffries match, and on the other side a dozen gamblers arguo and curse over a gamo of banker, and you have a faint hint of tho trials of a versifier." Not favourable surroundings for a poet, by any means. Hero are some specimens of Mac Gill's verso taken from a poem entitled "My Book-case":— The Book-case, shattered though it be, Still holds the Open Sesame which Is mine, and makes me more than'rich And holds the Ages slave to me. * * * to I call the dead from out their graves ■To hold communion sweet with me. The dreamer of the iEgean Sea, The Poet from Spczzia's waves, The Captive from the prison bars To tell an allegory, and The Traveller from the foreign land The long-dead Watcher of the stars. My Book-case, and a Kingdom's mine, When falls the night across the earth, And burns the fire upon the hearth, When tools lio idle by the line. Mac Gill has a knowledge of French and German, and has translated some of La Fontaine's Fables and Goethe's "Earl King."