on things instead of
expecting the morality of their cant phrases to act for them, to feed
the hungry, to clothe the naked, to pay their bills, and to save their
souls into the bargain, what a vast deal of good would be done, and what
an incalculable amount of foolish talk would be spared! But there is a
diplomatic spirit abroad in our day, and it is necessary to enter into
polite relations with a drowning man before it is possible to pull him
out of the water.

But the story, you say,--where is it? Forgive me. I am rusty and
ponderous at the start, like an old dredger that has stuck too long in
the mud. Let me move a little and swing out with the tide till I am in
clearer waters, and I will promise to bring up something pretty from the
bottom of the sea for you to look at. I would not have you see any of
the blackness that lies in the stagnant harbor.

I will tell you the story of Paul Patoff. I played a small part in it
myself last summer, and so, in a certain way, it is a tale of my own
experience. I say a tale, because it is emphatically a tale, and nothing
else. I might almost call it a yarn, though the word would look
strangely on a printed title-page. We are vain in our generation; we
fancy we have discovered something new under the sun, and we give the
name "novel" to the things we write. I will not insult literature by
honoring this story with any such high-sounding designation. A great
many of the things I am going to tell you were told to me, so that I
shall have some difficulty in putting the whole together in a connected
shape, and I must begin by asking your indulgence if I transgress all
sorts of rules, and if I do not succeed in getting the interesting
points into the places assigned to them by the traditional laws of art.
I tell what happened, and I do not pretend to tell any more.

I.

If places could speak, they would describe people far better than people
can describe places. No two men agree together in giving an account of a
country, of natural scenery, or of a city; and though we may read the
most accurate descriptions of a place, and vividly picture to ourselves
what we have never seen, yet, when we are at last upon the spot, we
realize that we have known nothing about it, and we loudly blame the
author, whose word-painting is so palpably false. People will always
think of places as being full of poetry if they are in love, as being
beautiful if they are well, hideous if they are ill