and usually with the happiest results.  The shipwreck of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine was extraordinary enough, but their subsequent conduct was rational almost to precision:  and in story-telling rationality does for fancy what economy of emotional utterances does for emotion.  We may apply to Mr. Stockton’s tales a remark which Mr. Saintsbury let fall some years ago upon dream-literature.  He was speaking particularly of Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint Antoine:—­

“The capacities of dreams and hallucinations for literary treatment are undoubted.  But most writers, including even De Quincey, who have tried this style, have erred, inasmuch as they have endeavoured to throw a portion of the mystery with which the waking mind invests dreams over the dream itself.  Anyone’s experience is sufficient to show that this is wrong.  The events of dreams as they happen are quite plain and matter-of-fact, and it is only in the intervals, and, so to speak, the scene-shifting of dreaming, that any suspicion of strangeness occurs to the dreamer.”

A dream, however wild, is quite plain and matter-of-fact to the dreamer; therefore, for verisimilitude, the narrative of a dream should be quite plain and matter-of-fact.  In the same way the narrator of an extremely fanciful tale should—­since verisimilitude is the first aim of story-telling—­attempt to exclude all suspicion of the unnatural from his reader’s mind.  And this is only done by persuading him that no suspicion of the unnatural occurred to the actors in the story.  And this again is best managed by making his characters persons of sound every-day common sense.  “If these are not upset by what befalls them, why”—­is the unconscious inference—­“why in the world should I be upset?”

So, in spite of the enormous difference between the two writers, there has been no one since Defoe who so carefully as Mr. Stockton regulates the actions of his characters by strict common sense.  Nor do I at the moment remember any writer who comes closer to Defoe in mathematical care for detail.  In the case of the True-born Englishman this carefulness was sometimes overdone—­as when he makes Colonel Jack remember with exactness the lists of articles he stole as a boy, and their value.  In the Adventures of Captain Horn the machinery which conceals and guards the Peruvian treasure is so elaborately described that one is tempted to believe Mr. Stockton must have constructed a working model of it with his own hands before he sat down to write the book.  In a way, this accuracy of detail is part of the common-sense character of the narrative, and undoubtedly helps the verisimilitude enormously.

A Genuine American.