a woman generally does tell a story,--sure to
make a mistake when she touches on a question of law; and--unconsciously
perhaps to herself--the woman of the World warps the facts in her
narrative so as to save the personal dignity of the hero, who has
captivated her interest, not from the moral odium of a great crime, but
the debasing position of a prisoner at the bar. Allen Fenwick, no doubt,
purposely omits to notice the discrepancy between these two statements,
or to animadvert on the mistake which, in the eyes of a lawyer, would
discredit Mrs. Poyntz's. It is consistent with some of the objects for
which Allen Fenwick makes public his Strange Story, to invite the reader
to draw his own inferences from the contradictions by which, even in the
most commonplace matters (and how much more in any tale of wonder!), a
fact stated by one person is made to differ from the same fact stated by
another. The rapidity with which a truth becomes transformed into fable,
when it is once sent on its travels from lip to lip, is illustrated
by an amusement at this moment in fashion. The amusement is this: In a
party of eight or ten persons, let one whisper to another an account
of some supposed transaction, or a piece of invented gossip relating to
absent persons, dead or alive; let the person, who thus first hears the
story, proceed to whisper it, as exactly as he can remember what he has
just heard, to the next; the next does the same to his neighbour, and so
on, till the tale has run the round of the party. Each narrator, as soon
as he has whispered his version of the tale, writes down what he has
whispered. And though, in this game, no one has had any interest to
misrepresent, but, on the contrary, each for his own credit's sake
strives to repeat what he has heard as faithfully as he can, it will
be almost invariably found that the story told by the first person has
received the most material alterations before it has reached the
eighth or the tenth. Sometimes the most important feature of the whole
narrative is altogether omitted; sometimes a feature altogether new and
preposterously absurd has been added. At the close of the experiment one
is tempted to exclaim, "How, after this, can any of those portions of
history which the chronicler took from hearsay be believed?" But, above
all, does not every anecdote of scandal which has passed, not through
ten lips, but perhaps through ten thousand, before it has reached us,
become quite as