"Probably!" said Brown. Whereupon the two citizens fell into a very deep and silent train of thought, leaving us no additional speech to record.
Other people than Smith, at about that time, felt like propounding the same queries as to the disposition of extra pay and rations. Some of those queries, which have been propounded, have not yet been answered. When they are, if that happy period ever arrives, we may know something more of the channels and sluices through which the wealth of the richest nation on the globe has ebbed away, leaving such inconsiderable results to show for the expenditure.
And yet Colonel Egbert Crawford, visiting the city two hours afterwards, and dropping in at two or three favorite resorts of men who talked horse, war and politics, on his way to the house of his cousin,—bore himself bravely under his weight of uniform, and more than once threw in a pardonable boast over the services he was rendering the country, the sacrifices he was making, and the rapid growth and efficiency of the Two Hundredth Regiment.
"All brass is not fashioned and moulded in foundries, where men do swelter like to those standing in the flames of the fiery furnace," says an old writer, Arnold of Thorndean, "but much of it doth become shaped in the human countenance."
CHAPTER XVI.
Two Modes of Writing Romances—More of the Up-town Mystery—A Watch, an Escape, and a Police Post-Mortem on a Vacant House.
The question may have been asked, before this point in narration, by some of those who have been induced to follow the progress of this story—What has become of some of the prominent characters first introduced, Dexter Ralston, the stalwart Virginian, and the girl Kate, who seemed at that time to be so closely identified with the movements of the "red woman." The curiosity is a natural one, whether there really was such a secret of disloyalty, hidden away either in the house on Prince Street or that on East 5—, as justified Tom Leslie and Walter Harding in their long ride at midnight and their subsequent interview with Police-Superintendent Kennedy. To some extent this question can be answered, at this point; but there will still remain some mysteries unexplainable until the end of this narration, and even some impossible to elucidate until the close of the war and the re-union of Northern and Southern society on the old basis, makes it possible to reveal all that may have occurred during the conflict.
There are two modes in which romances can be written. The first, and perhaps the more popular, is that in which no bound whatever is set by either probability or conscience—in which the narrator assumes to know what never could be known except to an omniscient being, and to describe such circumstances as never could have occurred in any world under the same general regulations as our own. To this writer, no doors are barred, and from him the secret of no heart can be hidden. He has no difficulty whatever in retracing the path of history, back to the days of Michael Paleologus or Timour the Tartar, and describing the viands set upon their tables and the thoughts that may have entered their brains; while in events of the present day he finds no more trouble in describing circumstantially the last moments of a traveller dying alone at the North Pole or in the midst of the most trackless waste of Sahara. The manner in which he became possessed of the facts narrated, is held to be a matter of very little consequence; and if he lacks the opportunity of calling other witnesses or surrounding circumstances to corroborate him, he at least is removed from the fear of any authoritative contradiction. The reader, of course, would sometimes be grateful for a little insight into what is so impenetrably hidden; and if the links binding the narrator to his subject were made a little plainer to the naked eye, perhaps more general satisfaction might be given. When, for instance, in the "Legend of the Terrible Tower," Sir Bronzeface the Implacable is shown as threatening the Lady Charmengarde with the most cruel tortures his slighted love and growing hate can devise—when the very words of that atrocious monster are set down as carefully as if they had been taken from his lips by the rapid pencil of the stenographer—and when in the context we learn that in the midst of his threatenings, the thousand barrels of gunpowder secretly stored in another part of the castle for the purpose of arming a million of retainers to make a deadly onslaught on the stronghold of his hated rival the Lord of Hardcheek, suddenly takes fire, and the castle, with both the interlocutors and all others who could possibly be present, is seen hurled into infinitesimal fragments,—there is some unavoidable curiosity in the mind of the reader, at this juncture, to know precisely how these very words and actions became known to the narrator, as well as how the gunpowder was manufactured in the year of grace nine hundred and eighty-four.
For corresponding knowledge of events in the actual present, the believers in clairvoyance may be able to offer some explanation; but, unfortunately or the reverse, the believers in effective clairvoyance are in a very meagre minority; and the world will cling a little tenaciously to the belief that what cannot be seen, heard, or otherwise realized by the recognized natural senses, cannot be definitely ascertained. Let it not be for one moment supposed, meanwhile, that romances constructed on such bases will be less popular than those which have more reason and probability at the bottom; for the majority of novel-readers desire to be frightened, mystified or idly amused; and perhaps that writer who makes thought a condition of reading and understanding what he writes, commits the most silly of crimes against his own pocket and reputation.