tly furnished
reason for the novel, 'The Red Badge of Courage,' by Mr. Stephen Crane,
which is out of counting the truest picture of the sort the world has
seen. It seemed at first impossible to believe that it had been written
by any but a veteran. It turns out that the author is quite a young man,
and that he gathered everything by reading and by hearsay. Here again
the method is national and characteristic. After all these years of
natural submission to British influence American writers are growing
racy of their own soil.

XIII.--THE YOUNG ROMANCERS

In the combined spelling and reading book which was in use in schools
more than forty years ago there was printed a story to the following
effect:--Certain Arabs had lost a camel, and in the course of their
wanderings in search of him they met a dervish, whom they questioned.
The dervish answered by offering questions on his own side. 'Was your
camel lame in one foot?' he began. 'Yes,' said the owners. 'Was he blind
in one eye?' he continued. 'Yes,' said the owners again. 'Had he lost a
front tooth?' 'Yes,' 'Was he laden with corn on one side and with honey
on the other?' 'Yes, yes, yes. This is our camel. Where have you seen
him?' The dervish answered: 'I have never seen him.' The Arabs, not
without apparent reason, suspected the dervish of playing with them,
and were about to chastise him, when the holy man asked for a hearing.
Having secured it, he explained. He had seen the track of the camel.
He had known the animal to be lame of one foot because that foot left
a slighter impression than the others upon the dust of the road. He had
argued it blind of one eye because it had cropped the herbage on one
side of the road alone. He knew it to have lost a tooth because of the
gap left in the centre of its bite. Bees and flies argued honey on one
side of the beast, and ants carrying wheat grains argued wheat on the
other. The name of this observant and synthetic-minded dervish was not
Sherlock Holmes, but he had the method of that famous detective, and in
a sense anticipated the plots of all the stories which Dr. Conan Doyle
has so effectively related of him. Possibly the best stories in the
world which depend for their interest on this kind of induction are
Edgar Allan Poe's. 'The Gold Bug,' 'The Murder in the Rue Morgue,' and
'The Stolen Letter' have not been surpassed or even equalled by any
later writer; but Dr. Doyle comes in an excellent second, and if he has