Founded on a fact well known among artists, but not often recognized or discussed.
If you have not read "LAVENDER AND OLD LACE" by the same author, you have a double pleasure in store--for these two books show Myrtle Reed in her most delightful, fascinating vein--indeed they may be considered as masterpieces of compelling interest.
The Prodigal Judge
By VAUGHAN KESTER
This great novel--probably the most popular book in this country to-day--is as human as a story from the pen of that great master of "immortal laughter and immortal tears," Charles Dickens.
The Prodigal Judge is a shabby outcast, a tavern hanger-on, a genial wayfarer who tarries longest where the inn is most hospitable, yet with that suavity, that distinctive politeness and that saving grace of humor peculiar to the American man. He has his own code of morals--very exalted ones--but honors them in the breach rather than in the observance.
Clinging to the Judge closer than a brother, is Solomon Mahaffy--fallible and failing like the rest of us, but with a sublime capacity for friendship; and closer still, perhaps, clings little Hannibal, a boy about whose parentage nothing is known until the end of the story. Hannibal is charmed into tolerance of the Judge's picturesque vices, while Miss Betty, lovely and capricious, is charmed into placing all her affairs, both material and sentimental, in the hands of this delightful old vagabond.
The Judge will be a fixed star in the firmament of fictional characters as surely as David Harum or Col. Sellers. He is a source of infinite delight, while this story of Mr. Kester's is one of the finest examples of American literary craftmanship.
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