that in the beginning this brilliant, pitiless lawyer, this
consciencelessly powerful advocate, at once mocker and poseur,
all but failed to interest me. A little of him and his monocle
went such a great way with me that I thought I had enough of him
by the end of the trial, where he gets off a man charged with
murder, and then cruelly snubs the homicide in his gratitude; and
I do not quite know how I kept on to the point where Steele in
his drunkenness first dazzles and then insults the gang of
drunken lumbermen, and begins his second life in the river where
they have thrown him, and where his former client finds him.
From that point I could not forsake him to the end, though I
found myself more than once in the world where things happen of
themselves and do not happen from the temperaments of its
inhabitants. In a better and wiser world, the homicide would not
perhaps be at hand so opportunely to save the life of the
advocate who had saved his; but one consents to this, as one
consents to a great deal besides in the story, which is
imaginably the survival of a former method. The artist's affair
is to report the appearance, the effect; and in the real world,
the appearance, the effect, is that of law and not of miracle.
Nature employs the miracle so very sparingly that most of us go
through life without seeing one, and some of us contract such a
prejudice against miracles that when they are performed for us we
suspect a trick. When I suffered from this suspicion in "The
Right of Way" I was the more vexed because I felt that I was in
the hands of a connoisseur of character who had no need of
miracles.

I have liked Mr. Parker's treatment of French-Canadian life, as
far as I have known it; and in this novel it is one of the