one
consents to a great deal besides in the story, which is imaginably the
survival of a former method. The artist's affair is to report the
appearance, the effect; and in the real world, the appearance, the
effect, is that of law and not of miracle. Nature employs the miracle
so very sparingly that most of us go through life without seeing one,
and some of us contract such a prejudice against miracles that when
they are performed for us we suspect a trick. When I suffered from
this suspicion in "The Right of Way" I was the more vexed because I
felt that I was in the hands of a connoisseur of character who had no
need of miracles.

I have liked Mr. Parker's treatment of French-Canadian life, as far as
I have known it; and in this novel it is one of the principal pleasures
for me. He may not have his habitant, his seigneur or his cure down
cold, but he makes me believe that he has, and I can ask no more than
that of him. In like manner, he makes the ambient, physical as well as
social, sensible around me: the cold rivers, the hard, clear skies,
the snowy woods and fields, the little frozen villages of Canada. In
this book, which is historical of the present rather than the past, he
gives one a realizing sense of the Canadians, not only in the country
but in the city, at least so far as they affect each other
psychologically in society, and makes one feel their interesting
temperamental difference from Americans. His Montrealers are still
Englishmen in their strenuous individuality; but in the frank
expression of character, of eccentricity, Charley Steele is like a type
of lawyer in our West, of an epoch when people were not yet content to
witness ideals of themselves, but when they wished to be their poetry
rather than to read it. In his second life he has the charm for the
imagination that a disembodied spirit might have, if it could be made
known to us in the circumstances of another world. He has, indeed,
made almost as clean a break with his past as if he had really been
drowned in the river. When, after the term of oblivion, in which he
knows nothing of his past self, he is restored to his identity by a
famous surgeon too opportunely out of Paris, on a visit to his brother,
the cure, the problem is how he shall expiate the errors of his past,
work out his redemption in his new life; and the author solves it for
him by appointing him to a life of unselfish labor, illumined by
actions of positive benefice