Hawthorne has blended different techniques and types of fiction in this firstperson narrative. There is for example an undercurrent of satire in the story of Mr. Bullfrog's supposedly successful marriage.

One "giveaway" of the author's satirical intent is Mr. Bullfrog's afterthought (following the coach accident) when he imagined that the Old Nick had killed his wife and jumped into her clothes. Given the context of this passage, which highlights the female ogre's furious beating of the coachman, the bridegroom's tender sentiments seem ludicrously out of place—and deliberately out of place as well. His idea of what the Old Nick did to Mrs. Bullfrog "seemed the most probable," he remarked, because he could not perceive her alive anywhere, nor, for all his close inspection of the area of the coach, could he find "any traces of that beloved woman's dead body.

There would have been a comfort...