“Well, you can strike me dead if I don’t goin’ to pay hall my debts! Allons!”
He began a merry little song to the effect that his sweetheart was a wine-bottle, and master and man, leaving care behind, returned to the picturesque Rue Royale. The ways of Providence are indeed strange. In all Parson Jones’s after-life, amid the many painful reminiscences of his visit to the City of the Plain, the sweet knowledge was withheld from him that by the light of the Christian virtue that shone from him even in his great fall, Jules St.-Ange arose, and went to his father an honest man.
OUR AROMATIC UNCLE
BY
Henry Cuyler Bunner
The title of Mr. Bunner’s story is attractive and stimulating to the imagination. The plot is slight, yet clever in its use of the surprise element. Its leading character is a splendid illustration of a hero-worshipper who is himself the real hero. The atmosphere is especially good. It is warmed by family affection and fragrant with romance. This romance, as Mr. Grabo points out in “The Art of the Short Story,” is suggested rather than recorded. The running away of the Judge’s son and of his little admirer, the butcher-boy, really lies outside the story proper. “With these youthful adventures the story has not directly to do, but the hints of the antecedent action envelop the story with a romantic atmosphere. The reader speculates upon the story suggested, and thereby is the written story enriched and made a part of a larger whole.”