ans, and duels, and
murders, and shipwrecks, and fires, and sudden deaths. He requires of
his author that he keep his mind steeped perpetually in blood and
thunder. You will always find that Old Joe is sitting on a penny
novelette, open at the place, and but little crumpled or creased from
the impress of his skeleton of a body. He is a great reader, one of the
greatest readers in London; and, perhaps, to no man in all the world
more than to Joe has literature brought so complete an escape from the
pressing demands of self-consciousness and the inconvenient emphasis of
personality.

It is at this point that we reach, by the reader's leave, the
psychological interest of this our simple story. For the problem
presents itself to Mr. Wells, as well as to me, whether all this violent
reading has not created in Joe's mind the impression of a Joe who never
was on sea or land. In other words: in the tale which Joe tells of his
own life, is any part of it fact, or is it not all a figment of his
brain, the creation of his bloody-minded authors? Joe himself believes
every word of it; Joe believes he was the Joe he tells you about, and
his face grows purple, and his glassy eyes dart fire out of their baggy
flesh, if you insinuate never so delicately that one of his stories is
in the very smallest detail just a little difficult of belief.

Mr. Wells never contradicts Joe; but every now and then (forgetting that
Joe can see) he shakes a sceptic head, and, leaning towards you,
whispers (forgetting that Joe can only hear when you shout at him) that
you must be pleased to remember that "_that's_ what he thinks he done;
and no doubt he _thinks_ that it was so; and it may be it was, and I
should never think of contradicting, not no man; but I has my own
opinion in the matter. _I don't_ think it was so. I think he's half
dreaming and half telling a tale. That's what _I_ think."

"But," you inquire, "is it not true that Joe was once a pirate?"

"Oh, yes," he cries at once, smiling proudly; "Oh, yes. Joe was a
pirate right enough. What, haven't you heard him tell how they boarded a
Spanish ship, and cut the throats and broke the heads of the swarthy
crew? Oh, you ought to hear him tell that. It's as good as a play." And
here he leans forward, and calls across to chuckling and gurgling Joe.
"Joe! Tell the genneman how you boarded that Spanish ship, and cut the
throats of them there swarthy Spaniards."

* * * *