Chuzzlewit" of Todgers's Boarding House with its complicated smells and its mottled shades of dinginess; or take his picture in "Little Dorrit" of Marseilles burning in the August sunlight with its broad, white, universal stare. Here is the art of journalism, the trick of intensification by omission,―carried to the limit. He aims distinctly at a certain effect, and he makes sure of getting it.

He takes long walks in the heart of London, attends police courts, goes behind the scenes of theatres, rides in omnibuses, visits prisons and work-houses. You think he is seeking realism. Quite wrong. He is seeking a sense of reality which shall make realism look like thirty cents. He is not trying to put up canned goods which shall seem more or less like fresh vegetables. He is trying to extract the essential flavor of places and people so that you can taste it in a drop.

We find in his style an accumulation of details all bearing on a certain point; nothing that serves his purpose is overlooked; everything that is likely to distract the attention or obscure his aim is disregarded. The head-lines are in the text. When the brute, Bill Sykes, says to Nancy: "Get up," you know what is coming. When Mrs. Todgers gives a party to Mr. Pecksniff you know what is coming. But the point is that when it comes, tragedy or comedy, it is as pure and unadulterated as the most brilliant of reporters could make it.

Naturally, Dickens puts more emphasis upon the contrast between his characters than upon the contrast within them. The internal inconsistencies and struggles, the slow processes of growth and change which are the delight of the psychological novelist do not especially interest him. He sees things black or white, not gray, The objects that attract him most, and on which he lavishes his art, do not belong to the average, but to the extraordinary. Dickens is not a commonplace merchant. He is a dealer in oddities and rarities, in fact the keeper of an "Old Curiosity Shop," and he knows how to set forth his goods with incomparable skill.

His drawing of character is sharp rather than deep. He makes the figure stand out, always recognizable, but not always really understood. Many of his people

are simply admirable incarnations of their particular trades or professions: Mould the undertaker, old Weller the coachman, Tulkinghorn the lawyer, Elijah Pogram the political demagogue, Blimber the school-master, Stiggins the religious ranter. Betsey Prig the day-nurse, Cap'n Cuttle the retired skipper. They are all as easy to identify as the wooden image in front of a tobacconist's shop. Others are embodiments of a single passion or quality: Pecksniff of unctuous hypocrisy, Micawber of joyous improvidence, Mr. Toots of dumb sentimentalism, Little Dorrit of the motherly instinct in a girl, Joe Gargery of the motherly instinct in a man, Mark Tapley of resolute and strenuous optimism. If these persons do anything out of harmony with their head-lines, Dickens does not tell of it. He does not care for the incongruities, the modifications, the fine shadings which soften and confuse the philosophic and reflective view of life. He wants to write his "story" sharply, picturesquely, with "snap" and plenty of local color; and he does it, in his happiest hours, with all the verve and skill of a star reporter for the Morning Journal of the Enchanted City.

In this graphic and emphatic quality the art of Dickens in fiction resembles the art of Hogarth in painting. But Dickens, like Hogarth, was much more than a reporter. He was a dramatist, and therefore he was also, by necessity, a moralist.

I do not mean that Dickens had a dramatic genius in the Greek sense that he habitually dealt with the eternal conflict between human passion and inscrutable destiny. I mean only this: that his lifelong love for the theatre often led him, consciously or unconsciously, to construct the scenario of a story with a view to dramatic effect, and to work up the details of a crisis precisely as if he saw it in his mind's eye on the stage.

Notice how the dramatis persona are clearly marked as comic, or tragic, or sentimental. The moment they come upon the scene you can tell whether they are meant to appeal to your risibilities or to your sensibilities. You are in no danger of laughing at the heroine, or sympathizing with the funny man, as you are tempted to do in some modern plays. Dickens knows too much to leave his au

dience in perplexity. He even gives to some of his personages set phrases, like the musical motifs of the various characters in the operas of Wagner, by which you may easily identify them. Mr. Micawber is forever "waiting for something to turn up." Mr. Toots always reminds us that "it's of no consequence." Sairey Gamp never appears without her imaginary friend Mrs. Harris. Mrs. General has "prunes and prism" perpetually on her lips.

Observe, also, how carefully the scene is set, and how wonderfully the preparation is made for a dramatic climax in the story. If it is a comic climax, like the trial of Mr. Pickwick for breach of promise, nothing is forgotten, from the hysterics of the obese Mrs. Bardell to the feigned indignation of Sergeant Buzfuz over the incriminating phrase "chops and tomato sauce!"

If it is a tragic climax, like the death of Bill Sykes, a score of dark premonitions lead up to it, the dingiest slum of London is chosen for it, the rank streets are filled with a furious crowd to witness it, and just as the murderer is about to escape, the ghostly eyes of his victim glare upon his crazed brain, and he plunges, tangled in his rope, to be hanged by the hand of the Eternal Judge as surely as if he stood upon the gallows.

Or suppose the climax is not one of shame and terror, but of pure pity and tenderness, like the death of Little Nell.

Then the quiet room is prepared for it, and the white bed is decked with winter berries and green leaves that the child loved because they loved the light, and gentle friends are there to read and talk to her, and she sleeps herself away in loving dreams, and the poor old grandfather, whom she has guided by the hand and comforted, kneels at her bedside, wondering why his dear Nell lies so still, and the very words which tell us of her peace and his grief, move rhythmically and plaintively, like soft music with a dying fall.

Close the book. The curtain descends. The drama is finished. The master has had his way with us; he has made us laugh; he has made us cry. We have been at the play.

But was it not as real to us while it lasted as many of the scenes in which we daily actors take our parts? And did it not mellow our spirits with mirth, and soften our hearts with tears? And now that it is over are we not likely to be a little better, a little kinder, a little happier for what we have laughed at or wept over?

Ah, master of the good enchantment, you have given us hours of ease and joy, and we thank you for them. But there is a greater gift than that. You have made us more willing to go cheerfully and comradely along the strange, crowded, winding way of human life, because you have deepened our faith that there is something of the divine on earth, and something of the human in heaven.

R

ANDALL and O'Hara fought the Bush every mile of their way westward from the End of the Steel to the Missinaibi. They slipped and stumbled in the soggy muskeg of the Transcontinental Right-ofWay across the North Country. They broke a transit and had to borrow one from their ancient enemies of the Groundhog River residency. They found their cache between the Kapuskasing and Crow Creek looted, and the contractor's camp beyond the creek burned to blackened squares, that loomed in the clearing like abandoned forts. Randall grumbled and O'Hara whistled as they lifted their canoe and swung into a dog-trot along the toteroad, where there was easy going for nearly an hour. They were almost cheerful when they came to the Missinaibi. And at the Missinaibi the Bush defeated them. Randall's foot slipped as he launched the birch-bark they had been carrying from their own residency for the crossing of the half-score rivers that sweep down to James Bay, between the Frederick House and the Kabinakagami. The canoe went from him before he could win back his unsteadied balance. And while the current tossed the craft toward Black Feather Rapid, the two engineers from Number Eight sat on a fallen log and pondered on the hardships besetting men who build railroads through wildernesses.

Back of them birches flamed gold against the dull green of tamaracs and jack-pines. Before them the river raced in the alluring mysteriousness of northern waters. October, winging her way to mellower forests, had drifted trails of her radiance over the dark Bush. But Randall and O'Hara, smoking dejectedly, glowered at river and woods with the intensity of hatred men feel for inanimate conquerors. They could not go forward without a canoe. Swim

BY N. C. WYETH

ming the Missinaibi with their instruments and kit-pack was out of the question. They were hungry, and they were tired, and having abused each other, they fell into abuse of all engineering in general, and Bush engineering in particular.

Randall, digging the heel of his moosehide boot savagely into the earth mould on the rock ledge where they sat, emphasized his imprecations by nervous tappings of the log with his level. "Sending us out to correct Nineteen's survey is the climax of the whole blamed deal," he ended a jerky peroration.

"Well, Ken couldn't help it." O'Hara always took fire at any implied criticism of the chief of Residency Number Eight. "Bannister gave him the order."

"Who said he could?" Randall flung back. "No one can help anything up here. We can't help it if we lose the canoe. We can't help it if the cache is looted. We can't help it if Bush fires sweep out camps. And it's certain we can't help it if there's a quicksand that those fellows at Nineteen missed."

"Grumbling never helped anything," O'Hara counselled.

"It's not hurting anything."

"Ye're an old woman," O'Hara stated without emotion. "Why did ye come if ye don't like these hazards, and why do ye stay?" he demanded, with fine disregard of his own previous discontent.

"Money," said Randall.

"Faith, there's plenty of that in the North Country, but none of it in the engineering," the Irishman commented. "There's a gold strike up the Mattagami. Why don't you go there?"

"Maybe I shall," Randall said. He set the level down on the ground, and from the inner pocket of his worn corduroy coat drew out a tattered map of the mining country to the south. "Ever try mining?" he asked O'Hara.