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intensely human as his men: he wins your sympathy for Isabel Guilbert,^[1] who was “Eve after the fall but before the bitterness of it was felt,” who “wore life as a rose in her bosom,” and who, according to Keogh, could “look at a man once, and he’ll turn monkey and climb trees to pick cocoanuts for her,” no less than he wins it for Norah, the self-sacrificing little sewing-girl, of Blind Man’s Holiday,^[2] or the practical, loyally passionate wife, Santa Yeager, of Hearts and Crosses,^[3] or the delightful Mrs. Cassidy who accepts the blows of her drunken husband as proof of his love (“Who else has got a right to be beat? I’d just like go catch him once beating anybody else!”) in A Harlem Tragedy,^[4] which would be grotesquely farcical if it were not for its droll air of truth and the curious sense of pathos that underlies it. . . .

I am not going to attempt to say which is the best of his tales; they vary so widely in subject and manner that it is impossible to compare them. There were moods in which he saw New York in all its solid, material, commonplace realism, and moods in which it became to him “Bagdad-on-the-Subway,” and was full of romance, as Soho is in Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights.” His Wild West stories are a subtle blend of humour, pathos, and picturesqueness; some of his town and country stories delight you by their