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"Harry," said my uncle, "it sounds like a wild invention from some story-teller's pen, and I should laugh in your face but for the proofs you have given me. But you must not stay here in this country. It is as much yours as any lucky adventurer's, but your right would be disputed in a hundred quarters; while, as for the Indians " "Disputed, Uncle?" I said interrupting him.
"Ah, I see," said Phillips, with a story-teller's intuition "the girl." "The first day I reached London I went to her banker's and got her address," continued Gordon. "And I wrote, saying I wanted to see her, but before I could get an answer I met her the next afternoon at a garden-party. At least I did not meet her; she was pointed out to me.
The Boy turned on her angrily, and saw her staring back at Joe's ighloo. There, sauntering calmly past the abhorred trap, was the story-teller's daughter. Past it? No. She actually halted and busied herself with her legging thong. "That girl must be an imbecile!" Or was it the apparition of her father, up at the Kachime entrance, that inspired such temerity?
A kindly, fascinating scheme was taking shape in the story-teller's brain. "Oh, Brida," she cried, in suppressed eagerness, lowering her voice to a whisper that should not reach Miss Lucy at the other end of the ward, "I've thought of the loveliest thing! Your home is n't very far from here, is it?" "A good ways why?" and Brida's little pale, freckled face showed only mild interest.
"An auctioneer," triumphantly asserted Boyton. "Wrong. He is a professional story-teller. He is as imaginative as Scheherazade and the merchants here are so busy that they always have time and inclination to listen to his long fairy tales." After each story the listeners dropped a small coin, valued at one- twentieth of a cent, into the story-teller's hat.
When she did happen to become conscious of her surroundings, she was callous, or merely indifferent, to them; for, compared with romance, life was dull and diffuse; it lacked the wilful simplicity, the exaggerative omissions, and forcible perspectives, which make up art: in other words, life demanded that unceasing work of selection and rejection, which it is the story-teller's duty to Perform for his readers.
There is one gift of Irving's which won him an easier as well as a wider triumph than that which awaited Hawthorne; and this is his ability to take the simple story-teller's tone, devoid of double meanings. Poe, also, had the passion for narrative in and for itself, but in him it was disturbed by a diseased mind, and resulted in a horrid fascination instead of cheerful attraction.
Smith's moving page the fair, gifted, almost idolized girl was dying, and Paul did not as yet know enough of the story-teller's craft of that day to be sure that she would recover in the next chapter. She mixed herself with the lady of the sandy ringlets who had described him as a dirty boy, and the pathos of the situation lent an added anguish to his thoughts.
He uses also the exotic flower, which Zenobia wears, as a physical symbol, but it plays no part and is only a relic of his old manner. The description of the performance in the country hall seems like an extract from one of the old annuals of the same calibre as the Story-Teller's Exhibition. Mesmerism is the feebler substitute for the old witchcraft element.
A light of credulity in a hearer's eye filled him with prodigious mirth, and it is doubtful if his listeners ever derived a fraction of the amusement from his fabrications that he himself enjoyed. Paloma's spirit of contradiction was the only fly in his ointment; now that his daughter was old enough to "keep books" on him, much of the story-teller's joy was denied him.
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