But there is one more that I daresay you are burning to put to myself;
and that is, what your own name is doing in this place, cropping up (as
it were uncalled-for) on the stern of our poor ship? If you were not
born in Arcadia, you linger in fancy on its margin; your thoughts are
busied with the flutes of antiquity, with daffodils, and the classic
poplar, and the footsteps of the nymphs, and the elegant and moving
aridity of ancient art. Why dedicate to you a tale of a cast so
modern:--full of details of our barbaric manners and unstable morals;
full of the need and the lust of money, so that there is scarce a page
in which the dollars do not jingle; full of the unrest and movement of
our century, so that the reader is hurried from place to place and sea
to sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama--in the end, as
blood-bespattered as an epic?

Well, you are a man interested in all problems of art, even the most
vulgar; and it may amuse you to hear the genesis and growth of "The
Wrecker." On board the schooner _Equator_, almost within sight of the
Johnstone Islands (if anybody knows where these are), and on a moonlit
night when it was a joy to be alive, the authors were amused with
several stories of the sales of wrecks. The subject tempted them; and
they sat apart in the alleyway to discuss its possibilities. "What a
tangle it would make," suggested one, "if the wrong crew were aboard.
But how to get the wrong crew there?"--"I have it!" cried the other;
"the so-and-so affair!" For not so many months before, and not so many
hundred miles from where we were then sailing, a proposition almost
tantamount to that of Captain Trent had been made by a British skipper
to some British castaways.

Before we turned in, the scaffolding of the tale had been put together.
But the question of treatment was as usual more obscure. We had long
been at once attracted and repelled by that very modern form of the
police novel or mystery story, which consists in beginning your yarn
anywhere but at the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the end;
attracted by its peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar
difficulties that attend its execution; repelled by that appearance of
insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable
drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clues,
receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless,
elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralli