ng but insignificant,
like a game of chess, not a work of human art. It seemed the cause might
lie partly in the abrupt attack; and that if the tale were gradually
approached, some of the characters introduced (as it were) beforehand,
and the book started in the tone of a novel of manners and experience
briefly treated, this defect might be lessened and our mystery seem to
inhere in life. The tone of the age, its movement, the mingling of races
and classes in the dollar hunt, the fiery and not quite unromantic
struggle for existence, with its changing trades and scenery, and two
types in particular, that of the American handy-man of business and that
of the Yankee merchant sailor--we agreed to dwell upon at some length,
and make the woof to our not very precious warp. Hence Dodd's father,
and Pinkerton, and Nares, and the Dromedary picnics, and the railway
work in New South Wales--the last and unsolicited testimonial from the
powers that be, for the tale was half written before I saw Carthew's
squad toil in the rainy cutting at South Clifton, or heard from the
engineer of his "young swell." After we had invented at some expense of
time this method of approaching and fortifying our police novel, it
occurred to us it had been invented previously by some one else, and was
in fact--however painfully different the results may seem--the method of
Charles Dickens in his later work.

I see you staring. Here, you will say, is a prodigious quantity of
theory to our halfpenny-worth of police novel; and withal not a shadow
of an answer to your question.

Well, some of us like theory. After so long a piece of practice, these
may be indulged for a few pages. And the answer is at hand. It was
plainly desirable, from every point of view of convenience and contrast,
that our hero and narrator should partly stand aside from those with
whom he mingles, and be but a pressed-man in the dollar hunt. Thus it
was that Loudon Dodd became a student of the plastic arts, and that our
globe-trotting story came to visit Paris and look in at Barbizon. And
thus it is, dear Low, that your name appears in the address of this
epilogue.

For sure, if any person can here appreciate and read between the lines,
it must be you--and one other, our friend. All the dominos will be
transparent to your better knowledge; the statuary contract will be to
you a piece of ancient history; and you will not have now heard for the
first time of the dangers of Roussillo