rofusion, in "The Hangman's Daughter." The ill-fated
gentleman hangman, Mr. Winston, who moved to Kenelham "where only about
two people were hung a year" is in my opinion worthy to be rated with
the deathless and ever-to-be glorious Mr. Salteena. Miss Ashford says
she was shocked when her brothers on hearing the trial scene read (pages
150, 151, 152) laughed at what she had conceived to be a tragic and
dramatic passage in the action of her tale. Later, no doubt, she has
come to realize how dangerous a thing it is for one to acquire, either
intentfully or otherwise, the reputation of being a humorist; for when
he who has been branded as a humorist says a thing with desire to be
serious his friends laugh at it as a most rare whimsicality and when, on
the other hand, he deliberately sets out to be humorous, his enemies
very likely will declare that never before in all his life was he quite
so serious. And had her brothers been older, had they been of an age to
appreciate the unconscious comedy that marked the Dreyfus trial, say, or
had they ever had opportunity to hear the proceedings in sundry murder
trials in America, when learned counsel was asking questions and learned
alienists were making answers, they would have been able to appreciate
the fact that no burlesque description of a murder trial can ever be
quite so utterly comic as a real murder trial sometimes is.

A flashing jewel of dramatic intensity awaits you (pages 229 to 234
inclusive) when you come to read of the rescue of Gladys and Helen from
the grasp of the murderer of Helen's own dear father and of the method
employed by Gladys' heroic brother for detaining the miscreant Likewise,
I pray you, reader dear, that you linger on page 257 wherein the "menu
of the table d'hote" which was "of nightly recurrence" at Lord
Beaufort's castle, is printed in full. In my mind's eye I see little
Miss Daisy Ashford, twelve years old going on thirteen, carefully
bearing away with her the card of the first meal she ever ate in a
regular restaurant and taking it home and treasuring it up against the
time when she might insert it into her greatest story, then in process
of incubation, at exactly the appointed spot to create the most telling
effect, under the most appropriate possible circumstances. Could a
proper respect and a proper instinct for local color rise to greater
heights? I deny it. So too will you deny it when you arrive at page 258
and read the words emphasized by