certain points he enlarged the
capacity of the facts. He described with a good deal of graphic force
the Northwick interior. Under his touch the hall expanded, the staircase
widened and curved, the carpets thickened, the servants multiplied, the
library into which "the _Events_' representative was politely ushered,"
was furnished with "all the appliances of a cultured taste." The works
of the standard authors in costly bindings graced its shelves;
magnificent paintings and groups of statuary adorned its walls and
alcoves. The dress of the lady who courteously received the _Events_'
reporter, was suitably enriched; her years were discounted, and her
beauty approached to the patrician cast. There was nothing mean about
Pinney, and while he was at it he lavished a manorial grandeur upon the
Northwick place, outside as well as inside. He imparted a romantic
consequence to Hatboro' itself: "A thriving New England town, proud of
its historic past, and rejoicing in its modern prosperity, with a
population of some five or six thousand souls, among whose working men
and women modern ideas of the most advanced character had been realized
in the well-known Peck Social Union, with its co-operative kitchen and
its clientele of intelligent members and patrons."

People of all occupations became leading residents in virtue of taking
Pinney into their confidence, and "A Prominent Proletarian" achieved the
distinction of a catch-line by freely imparting the impressions of J. M.
Northwick's character among the working-classes. "The Consensus of
Public Feeling," in portraying which Pinney did not fail to exploit the
proprietary word he had seized, formed the subject of some dramatic
paragraphs; and the whole formed a rich and fit setting for the main
facts of Northwick's undoubted fraud and flight, and for the conjectures
which Pinney indulged in concerning his fate.

Pinney's masterpiece was, in fine, such as he could write only at that
moment of his evolution as a man, and such as the _Events_ could publish
only at that period of its development as a newspaper. The report was
flashy and vulgar and unscrupulous, but it was not brutal, except by
accident, and not unkind except through the necessities of the case. But
it was helplessly and thoroughly personal, and it was no more
philosophized than a monkish chronicle of the Middle Ages.

The _Abstract_ addressed a different class of readers, and aimed at a
different effect in its treatm