me out of the Balkans. At that time it was a dim, unknown land, a kind
of novelists' Coast of Bohemia, an appropriate setting for distressed
princesses. I'll hazard a guess that there was not a peak in all that
district on which there was not some Black Rudolph's castle, not a road
that did not clack romantically with horses' hoofs on bold adventure. But
the wars have changed all this by bringing too sharp a light upon the dim
scenery of this pageantry, and swash-bucklery is all but dead.

To confess the truth, it is in such stories that I like horses best. In
real life I really do not like them at all. I am rather afraid of them as
of strange organisms that I can neither start with ease nor stop with
safety. It is not that I never rode or drove a horse. I have achieved
both. But I don't urge him to deviltry. Instead I humor his whims. Some
horses even I might be fond of. Give me a horse that nears the age of
slippered pantaloon and is, moreover, phlegmatic in his tastes, and then,
as the stories say "with tightened girth and feet well home"--but enough!
I must not be led into boasting.

But in these older stories I love a horse. With what fire do his hoofs
ring out in the flight of elopement! "Pursuit's at the turn. Speed my
brave Dobbin!" And when the Prince has kissed the Princess' hand, you know
that the story is nearly over and that they will live happily ever after.
Of course there is always someone to suggest that Cinderella was never
happy after she left her ashes and pumpkins and went to live in the
palace. But this is idle gossip. Even if there were "occasional
bickerings" between her and the Prince, this is as Lamb says it should be
among "near relations."

I nearly died of "Crime and Punishment." These Russian novelists have too
distressful a point of view. They remind me too painfully of the poem--

It was dreadful dark
In that doleful ark
When the elephants went to bed.

Doubtless if the lights burn high in you, it is well to read such gloom as
is theirs. Perhaps they depict life. These things may be true and if so,
we ought to know them. At the best, theirs is a real attempt "to cleanse
the foul body of the infected world." But if there be a blast without and
driving rain, must we be always running to the door to get it in our face?
Will not one glance in the evening be enough? Shall we be always exposing
ourselves "to feel what wretches feel"? It is true that we are too content
under the s