For the consolation of those readers who have an antipathy to mutilated heroes, it may be stated that Stephen’s hurts healed, leaving no other bad effects than ugly scars.
For the consolation of conscientious readers, it may be stated that Hiram Monk and Jim Horniss were tried by law, and sentenced to the punishment they deserved. If a learned lawyer should be beguiled into reading this story, he might know what punishment those wretches deserved—he might even guess at what punishment they received.
But the majesty of the law is possessed of a fickle mind.
Chapter XLVI.
The Story Closed.
Some novels, like an endless chain, seem to have neither beginning nor end; others, while they give every little incident with wearisome minuteness, stop suddenly when they come to the colophon, pause in doubt and trepidation, and finally conclude with two or three sentences of sententious brevity, in which the word marriage occurs at least once. The writer of this history, like all right-minded scribes, becomes disgusted when the last difficulty is surmounted, but yet has sufficient moral power to devote a whole chapter (though a short one) to the conclusion. Gentle reader, you ought to be indulgent to one who has such self-abnegation—such firmness of purpose—such greatness of mind.
This story draws to an end for several reasons: first, there is no great affinity between schoolboys, for whom it professes to be written, and volumes seventy-nine chapters in length; secondly, if the reader is not tired of it, the writer begins to be; thirdly, a story dies a natural death as soon as its writer unriddles, or attempts to unriddle, its mysteries; fourthly (and this is perhaps the strongest reason of all), there is nothing more to be written.
If there are other reasons why the story should be brought to an end, they concern the writer, not the reader, and therefore need not be specified. But in case the reader should care to hear what became of those boys, the writer graciously spins out a few pages more.
Naturally they married, observes the reader who is familiar with works of fiction. Certainly; every one of them married.
Marmaduke fell desperately in love; and, as was evinced when he rescued Sauterelle, he was a man who could love passionately and for ever. He married the object of his choice, of course. By the way, she was actually a French heiress—at least, her papa was a Frenchman teaching French in one of our colleges, and on the wedding-day he gave her the magnificent dowry of five hundred dollars, the accumulated savings of very many years.