m 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.

But to my mind Mr. Stockton's characters are even more original than
the machinery of his stories. And in their originality they reflect
not only Mr. Stockton himself, but the race from which they and their
author spring. In fact, they seem to me about the most genuinely
American things in American fiction. After all, when one comes to
think of it, Mrs. Lecks and Captain Horn merely illustrate that ready
adaptation of Anglo-Saxon pluck and businesslike common sense to
savage and unusual circumstances which has been the real secret of the
colonization of the North American Continent. Captain Horn's
discovery and winning of the treasure may differ accidentally, but do
not differ in essence, from a thousand true tales of commercial
triumph in the great Central Plain or on the Pacific Slope. And in the
heroine of the book we recognize those very qualities and aptitudes
for which we have all learnt to admire and esteem the American girl.
They are hero and heroine, and so of course we are presented with the
better side of a national character; but then it has been the better
side which has done the business. The bitterest critic of things
American will not deny t