and transferred from ship to ship, with orders to
those in charge that his country and its concerns should never be
spoken of in his presence. Such an air of reality was given to the
narrative by incidental references to actual persons and occurrences
that many believed it true, and some were found who remembered Philip
Nolan, but had heard different versions of his career. The author of
this clever hoax--if hoax it may be called--was Edward Everett Hale, a
Unitarian clergyman of Boston, who published a collection of stories in
1868, under the fantastic title, _If, Yes, and Perhaps_, indicating
thereby that some of the tales were possible, some of them probable,
and others might even be regarded as essentially true. A similar
collection, _His Level Best, and Other Stories_, was published in 1873,
and in the interval three volumes of a somewhat different kind, the
_Ingham Papers_ and _Sybaris and Other Homes_, both in 1869, and _Ten
Times One Is Ten_, in 187l. The author shelters himself behind the
imaginary figure of Captain Frederic Ingham, pastor of the Sandemanian
Church at Naguadavick, and the same characters have a way of
re-appearing in his successive volumes as old friends of the reader,
which is pleasant at first, but in the end a little tiresome. Mr. Hale
is one of the most original and ingenious of American story-writers.
The old device of making wildly improbable inventions appear like fact
by a realistic treatment of details--a device employed by Swift and
Edgar Poe, and more lately by Jules Verne--became quite fresh and novel
in his hands, and was managed with a humor all his own. Some of his
best stories are _My Double and How He Undid Me_, describing how a busy
clergyman found an Irishman who looked so much like himself that he
trained him to pass as his duplicate, and sent him to do duty in his
stead at public meetings, dinners, etc., thereby escaping bores and
getting time for real work; the _Brick Moon_, a story of a projectile
built and launched into space, to revolve in a fixed meridian about the
earth and serve mariners as a mark of longitude; the _Rag Man and Rag
Woman_, a tale of an impoverished couple who made a competence by
saving the pamphlets, advertisements, wedding-cards, etc., that came to
them through the mail, and developing a paper business on that basis;
and the _Skeleton in the Closet_, which shows how the fate of the
Southern Confederacy was involved in the adventures of a certai