That is the case presented by the Dame’s papers, when the incredible is excised.  She claims the being a good friend to fiction in feeding popular voracity with all her stores.  But the Old Buccaneer, no professed friend to it, is a sounder guide in the maxim, where he says:  Deliver yourself by permit of your cheque on the ’Bank of Reason, and your account is increased instead of lessened.

Our account with credulity, he would signify.

The Dame does not like the shaking for a sifting.  Romance, however, is not a mountain made of gold, but a vein running some way through; and it must be engineered, else either we are filled with wind from swallowing indigestible substance, or we consent to a debasing of the currency, which means her to-morrow’s bankruptcy; and the spectacle of Romance in the bankruptcy court degrades us (who believe we are allied to her) as cruelly as it appals.  It gives the cynic licence to bark day and night for an entire generation.

Surely the Countess of Fleetwood’s drive from the Welsh borders to Esslemont, accompanied by the chosen of the land, followed by the vivats of the whole Principality, and England gaping to hear the stages of her progress, may be held sufficiently romantic without stuffing of surprises and conflicts, adventures at inns, alarms at midnight, windings of a horn over hilly verges of black heaths, and the rape of the child, the pursuit, the recovery of the child, after a new set of heroine performances on the part of a strung-wire mother, whose outcry in a waste country district, as she clasps her boy to her bosom again:  ’There’s a farm I see for milk for him!’ the Dame repeats, having begun with an admission that the tale has been contradicted, and is not produced on authority.  The end in design is to win the ear by making a fuss, and roll event upon event for the braining of common intelligence, until her narrative resembles dusty troopings along a road to the races.

Carinthia and her babe reached Esslemont, no matter what impediments.  There, like a stopped runner whose pantings lengthen to the longer breath, her alarms over the infant subsided, ceasing for as long as she clasped it or was in the room with it.  Walking behind the precious donkey-basket round the park, she went armed, and she soon won a fearful name at Kentish cottage-hearths, though she ’was not black to see, nor old.  No, she was very young.  But she did all the things that soldiers do,—­was a bit of a foreigner;—­she brought a reputation up from the Welsh land, and it had a raven’s croak and a glow-worm’s drapery and a goblin’s origin.

Something was hinted of her having agitated London once.  Somebody dropped word of her and that old Lord Levellier up at Croridge.  She stalked park and country at night.  Stories, one or two near the truth, were told of a restless and a very decided lady down these parts as well; and the earl her husband daren’t come nigh in his dread of her, so that he runs as if to save his life out of every place she enters.  And he’s not one to run for a trifle.  His pride is pretty well a match for princes and princesses.