remember her at our little gatherings for the heathen." A text is
forgotten. The clouds are empty caravels. He calls to Betsy, the
housemaid, for a fresh neckcloth and his gaiters. He has recalled a
meeting with the Vicar and goes out whistling softly, to disaster.

You do not find delightful fooling like this every day; and there is
much more of it. Take this:

Suppose, for a better example, that the cheerful Mark Tapley, who
always came out strong in adversity, were placed in a modern
Russian novel. As the undaunted Taplovitch he would have shifted
its gloom to a sunny ending. Fancy our own dear Pollyanna, the glad
girl, adopted by an aunt in "Crime and Punishment." Even
Dostoyevsky must have laid down his doleful pen to give her at last
a happy wedding--flower-girls and angel-food, even a shrill soprano
behind the hired palms and a table of cut glass.

Oliver Twist and Nancy--merely acquaintances in the original
story--with a fresh hand at the plot, might have gone on a bank
holiday to Margate. And been blown off shore. Suppose that the
whole excursion was wrecked on Treasure Island and that everyone
was drowned except Nancy, Oliver, and perhaps the trombone player
of the ships' band, who had blown himself so full of wind for
fox-trots on the upper deck that he couldn't sink. It is Robinson
Crusoe, lodging as a handsome bachelor on the lonely
island--observe the cunning of the plot!--who battles with the
waves and rescues Nancy. The movie-rights alone of this are worth a
fortune. And then Crusoe, Oliver, Friday, and the trombone player
stand a siege from John Silver and Bill Sikes, who are pirates,
with Spanish doubloons in a hidden cove. And Crusoe falls in love
with Nancy. Here is a tense triangle. But youth goes to youth.
Crusoe's whiskers are only dyed their glossy black. The trombone
player, by good luck (you see now why he was saved from the wreck),
is discovered to be a retired clergyman--doubtless a Methodist. The
happy knot is tied. And then--a sail! A sail! Oliver and Nancy
settle down in a semi-detached near London, with oyster shells
along the garden path and cat-tails in the umbrella jar. The story
ends prettily under their plane-tree at the rear--tea for three,
with a trombone solo, and the faithful Friday and Old Bill,
reforme