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Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 56, 13 April 1914, Page 6

The makers of fiction- have a persistent way of anticipating fact. The latest case in point is suggested by a cablegram from Stockholm, published on Saturday. Karl Petersen, a wealthy merchant, doubted his wife and decided to test her love. He arranged his own '' death'' with all detail, even to the reading of his'will. His fears were realised; and he leapt from his coflSn to confound the faithless woman and her paramour. All this in the year 1914. Some 11 years before —to be exact, on October 18, 1903 —there was played for the first time at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, a brief drama setting out a j similar circumstance. J. M. Synge, the inost perfect craftsman of the Irish imovement, works out the j>lot in that ' archaic English with its wealth of metaphor and glory of reference to things at once common and, maybe, beautiful or terrible, so that about it all there is nothing sordid, nothing unclean, nothing vulgar. In Synge's tale the woman is young "and is married to a harsh old man, and has dwelt long in the shadow of the glen, a place of much twilight and many changing mists—"and seeing nothing but the mists rolling down the bog, and hearing nothing but the wind crying out in the bit£ of broken trees that were left from the gr.eat storm, and the streams roaring with the rain.'' with quiet voices, the three characters speak, until the woman has said that which condemns her . . . then the .door is opened that she may go out; and is closed behind her. Within the cottage remains the husband, an old man and infinitely lonely, left to watch the days go past "and him counting them." Somewhere in : the night, along th - weary roads, tramps the woman. In essential, the stories are the same, the "difference lying merely in the circumstances of the people and the way the tale is. told. Now, had that merchant of Stockholm read Synge (which is not impossible, for Europe knows well that 10 years ago there were writers in England), or did the Irishman but recast an incident of which he had heard tell?