 CHAPTER I. HOW TO TELL A STORY. THE HUMOROUS STORY, AN AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT. IT'S DIFFERENCE FROM COMIC AND WHITTY STORIES. I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told, for I have been almost daily in the company of the most expert storytellers for many years. There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind, the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American. The comic story is English. The witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling, the comic story and the witty story upon the matter. The humorous story may be spun out to great length and may wander around as much as it pleases and arrive nowhere in particular. But the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst. The humorous story is strictly a work of art, high and delicate art, and only an artist can tell it. But no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story—anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story—understand I mean by word of mouth, not print—was created in America and has remained at home. The humorous story is told gravely. The teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it. But the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through. And sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy that he will repeat the knob of it and glance around from face to face, collecting applause, and then repeat it again. It is a pathetic thing to see. Very often, of course, the rambling and disjointed humorous story finishes with a knob, point, snapper or whatever you like to call it, then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert attention from that knob by dropping it in a carefully casual and indifferent way with the pretense that he does not know it is a knob. Artemis Ward used that trick a good deal, and when the belated audience presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise as if wondering what they had found to laugh at. Dan Satchel used it before him, Nye and Riley and others use it today. But the teller of the comic story does not slur the knob, he shouts it at you every time, and when he prints it in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whopping exclamation points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis, all of which is very depressing and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life. Let me set down an instance of the comic method, using an anecdote which has been popular all over the world for twelve or fifteen hundred years. The teller tells it in this way, the wounded soldier. In the course of a certain battle a soldier whose leg had been shot off, appealed to another soldier who was hurrying by to carry him to the rear, informing him at the time of the loss which he had sustained, whereupon the generous son of Mars, shouldering the unfortunate, proceeded to carry out his desire. The bullets and cannon-balls were flying in all directions, and presently one of the latter took the wounded man's head off, without, however, his deliverer being aware of it. In no long time he was hailed by an officer who said, Where are you going with that carcass? To the rear, sir, he's lost his leg. His leg, forsooth, responded the astonished officer, you mean his head, you booby, whereupon the soldier dispossessed himself of his burden, and stood looking down upon it in great perplexity. At length he said, It is true, sir, just as you have said. Then after a pause he added, But he told me it was his leg. Here the narrator bursts into explosion after explosion of thunderous horse laughter, repeating that nub from time to time, through his gaspings and shriekings and suffocatings. It takes only a minute and a half to tell that in its comic story form, and isn't worth the telling after all, put into the humorous story form, it takes ten minutes, and is often the funniest thing I have ever listened to, as James Whitcombe Riley tells it. He tells it in the character of a dull-witted old farmer who has just heard it for the first time, thinks it is unspeakably funny, and is trying to repeat it to a neighbor. But he can't remember it, so he gets all mixed up, and wanders helplessly round and round, putting in tedious details that don't belong in the tale, and only retard it, taking them out conscientiously and putting in others that are just as useless, making minor mistakes now and then, and stopping to correct them, and explain how he came to make them, remembering things which he forgot to put in in their proper place, and going back to put them in there, telling his narrative a good while in order to try to recall the name of the soldier that was hurt, and finally remembering that the soldier's name was not mentioned, and remarking placidly that the name is of no real importance anyway, better, of course, if one knew it, but not essential, after all, and so on, and so on, and so on. The teller is innocent and happy, and pleased with himself, and has to stop every little while, to hold himself in, and keep from laughing outright, and does hold in, but his body quakes in a jelly-like way with interior chuckles, and at the end of the ten minutes the audience have laughed until they are exhausted, and the tears are running down their faces. The simplicity, and innocence, and sincerity, and unconsciousness of the old farmer are perfectly simulated, and the result is a performance which is thoroughly charming and delicious. This is art, and fine and beautiful, and only a master can compass it, but a machine could tell the other story. To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct. Another feature is the slurring of the point. A third is the dropping of a studied remark, apparently, without knowing it, as if one were thinking aloud. The fourth, and last, is the pause. Artemis Ward dealt in Numbers 3 and 4 a good deal. He would begin to tell with great animation something which he seemed to think was wonderful. Then lose confidence, and, after an apparently absent-minded pause, made an incongruous remark in a soliloquizing way, and that was the remark intended to explode the mind. And it did. For instance, he would say eagerly, excitedly, I once knew a man in New Zealand who hadn't a tooth in his head. Here his animation would die out. A silent reflective pause would follow. Then he would say dreamily and as if to himself, and yet that man could beat a drum better than any man I ever saw. The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature too. It is a dainty thing and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous, for it must be exactly the right length no more and no less, or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short, the impressive point is passed, and the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is intended, and then you can't surprise them, of course. On the platform I used to tell a negro ghost story that had a pause in front of the snapper on the end, and that pause was the most important thing in the whole story. If I got at the right length precisely, I could spring the finishing ejaculation with effect enough to make some impressible girl deliver a startled little yelp and jump out of her seat. And that was what I was after. This story was called The Golden Arm, and was told in this fashion. You can practice with it yourself, and mind you look out for the pause and get it right. The Golden Arm. Once upon a time there was a monstous mean man, and he lived way out in the prairie all alone by self, except now to wife, and by and by she died, and he took and toted her way out there in the prairie and buried her. Well, she had a golden arm, all solid gold, from the shoulder down. He was powerful mean, powerful, and that night he couldn't sleep, because he won't that golden arm so bad. When it come midnight he couldn't stand no more, so he get up, he did, and took his lantern and shoved out through the storm and dug her up and got the golden arm. And he bent his head down in the wind and plowed and plowed and plowed through the snow. Then all of a sudden he stopped, make a considerable pause here and look startled and take a listening attitude, and say, my land, what's that? And you listen and listen, and then when say, set your teeth together and imitate the wailing and wheezing sing-song of the wind, and then way back yonder, while the grave is, he hear a voice, hear a voice all mixed up in the wind, can't hardly tell him apart. Oh, God, my golden arm! Who ought my golden arm? You must begin to shiver violently now. And he begin to shiver and shake and say, oh, my, oh, my land, and the wind blow the lantern out, and the snow and the sleep blow in his face, and most choke him. And he start plowing knee-deep towards home most dead. He so scared, and pretty soon he hear the voice again, and pause. It is coming after him. Oh, God, my golden arm! When he get to the pasture, he hear it again, close to now in the coming, a coming back die in the dark and the storm, repeat the wind and the voice. When he get to the house, he rush upstairs and jump into bed and give her up head and ears, and lay there shivering and shaking, and then way out there he hear it again, and a coming, and by and by he hear, pause, odd listening attitude, pat, it's a coming upstairs. Then he hear the latch, and he know it's in the room. Then, pretty soon he know it's a standin' by the bed. Pause. Then he know it's a bendin' down over him, and he can't scarcely get his breath. Then, then, he seem to feel something cold, right down most again his head. Pause. Then the voice say, right at his ear, Oh, God, my golden arm! You must wail it out very plaintively and accusingly. Then you stare steadily and impressively into the face of the farthest gone auditor, a girl preferably, and let that awe-inspiring pause begin to build itself in the deep hush when it has reached exactly the right length. Jump suddenly at that girl and yell, You've got it! If you've got the pause right, she'll fetch a dear little yelp and spring right out of her shoes. But you must get the pause right, and you will find it the most troublesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever undertook. CHAPTER II. I have committed sins, of course. But I have not committed enough of them to entitle me to the punishment of reduction to the bread and water of ordinary literature during six years when I might have been living on the fat diet spread for the righteous in Professor Doudin's Life of Shelley, if I had been justly dealt with. During these six years I have been living a life of peaceful ignorance. I was not aware that Shelley's first wife was unfaithful to him, and that that was why he deserted her and wiped the stain from his sensitive honour by entering into soiled relations with Godwin's young daughter. This was all new to me when I heard it lately, and was told that the proofs of it were in this book, and that this book's verdict is accepted in the girl's colleges of America and its view taught in their literary classes. In each of these six years, multitudes of young people in our country have arrived at the Shelley Reading Age. Are these six multitudes unacquainted with this life of Shelley? Perhaps they are. Indeed, one may feel pretty sure that the great bulk of them are. To these then I address myself in the hope that some account of this romantic historical fable, and the fabulous manner of constructing and adorning it, may interest them. First as to its literary style. Our Negroes in America have several ways of entertaining themselves which are not found among the whites anywhere. Among these inventions of theirs is one which is particularly popular with them. It is a competition in elegant deportment. They hire a hall, and bank the spectator's seats in rising tears along the two sides, leaving all the middle stretch of the floor free. A cake is provided as a prize for the winner in the competition, and a bench of experts in deportment is appointed to award it. Sometimes there are as many as fifty contestants, male and female, and five hundred spectators. One at a time the contestants enter, closed regardless of expense, in what each considers the perfection of style and taste, and walk down the vacant central space and, back again, with that multitude of critical eyes on them. All that the competitor knows of fine airs and graces he throws into his carriage. All that he knows of seductive expression he throws into his countenance. He may use all the helps he can devise, watch chain to twirl with his fingers, gain to do graceful things with, snowy handkerchief to flourish and get artful effects out of, shiny new stovepipe hat to assist in his courtly boughs, and the colored lady may have a fan to work up her effects with, and smile over and blush behind, and she may add other helps according to her judgment. When the review by individual detail is over, a grand review of all the contestants in procession follows, with all the airs and graces and all the bowings and smirkings on exhibition at once, and this enables the bench of experts to make the necessary comparisons and arrive at a verdict. The successful competitor gets the prize which I have before mentioned, and an abundance of applause and envy along with it. The negroes have a name for this grave deportment tournament, a name taken from the prize contented for. They call it a cake-walk. This shelly biography is a literary cake-walk. The ordinary forms of speech are absent from it. All the pages, all the paragraphs, walk by sedately, elegantly, not to say mincingly, in their Sunday best, shiny and sleek, perfumed, and with butaneers in their buttonholes. It is rare to find even a chance sentence that has forgotten to dress. If the book wishes to tell us that Mary Godwin, child of sixteen, had known afflictions, the fact saunters forth in this knobby outfit. Mary was herself not unlearned in the lure of pain, meaning by that that she had not always travelled on asphalt, or as some authorities would frame it, that she had been there herself, a form which, while preferable to the book's form, is still not to be recommended. If the book wishes to tell us that Harriet Shelly hired a wet nurse, that commonplace fact gets turned into a dancing master who does his professional bow before us in pumps and knee-bridges, with his fiddle under one arm and his crush hat under the other, thus the beauty of Harriet's motherly relation to her babe was marred in Shelly's eyes by the introduction into his house of a hireling nurse to whom was delegated the mother's tenderest office. This is perhaps the strangest book that has seen the light since Frankenstein. Indeed, it is a Frankenstein itself, a Frankenstein with the original infirmity supplemented by a new one, a Frankenstein with the reasoning faculty wanting. Yet it believes it can reason, and is always trying. It is not content to leave a mountain of fact standing in the clear sunshine where the simplest reader can perceive its form, its details, and its relation to the rest to the landscape, but thinks it must help him examine it and understand it. So its drifting mind settles upon it with that intent, but always with one and the same result there is a change of temperature, and the mountain is hid in a fog. Every time it sets up a premise and starts to reason from it, there is a surprise in store for the reader. It is strangely nearsighted, cross-eyed, and purrblind. Sometimes when a mastodon walks across the field of its vision, it takes it for a rat. At other times it does not see it at all. The materials of this biographical fable are facts, rumors, and poetry. They are connected together and harmonized by the help of suggestion, conjecture, innuendo, perversion, and semi-suppression. The fable has a distinct object in view, but this object is not acknowledged in set words. Percy Bish Shelley has done something which, in the case of other men, is called a grave crime. It must be shown that in his case it is not that, because he does not think as other men do about these things. Or not that to be enough, if the fabulist is serious? Having proved that a crime is not a crime, was it worthwhile to go on and fasten the responsibility of a crime, which was not a crime, upon somebody else? What is the use of hunting down and holding to bitter account people who are responsible for other people's innocent acts? Still, the fabulist thinks it a good idea to do that. In his view, Shelley's first wife, Harriet, free of all offence as far as we have historical facts for guidance, must be held unforgivably responsible for her husband's innocent act in discerting her and taking up with another woman. Anyone will suspect that this task has its difficulties. Anyone will divine that nice work is necessary here, cautious work, wily work, and that there is entertainment to be had in watching the magician do it. There is indeed entertainment in watching him. He arranges his facts, his rumours, and his poems on his table, in full view of the house, and shows you that everything is there, no deception, everything fair and aboveboard. And this is apparently true. Yet there is a defect, for some of his best stock is hid in an appendix basket behind the door, and you do not come upon it until the exhibition is over, and the enchantment of your mind accomplished, as the magician thinks. There is an insistent atmosphere of candor and fairness about this book, which is engaging at first, then a little burdensome, then a trifle fatiguing, then progressively suspicious, annoying, irritating, and oppressive. It takes one some little time to find out that phrases which seem intended to guide the reader aright are there to mislead him, that phrases which seem intended to throw light are there to throw darkness, that phrases which seem intended to interpret a fact are there to misinterpret it, that phrases which seem intended to forestall prejudice are there to create it, that phrases which seem antidotes are poisons in disguise. The naked facts arrayed in the book established Shelley's guilt in that one episode, which disfigures his otherwise superlatively lofty and beautiful life, but the historians' careful and methodical misinterpretation of them transfers the responsibility to the wife's shoulders, as he persuades himself. The few meager facts of Harriet Shelley's life, as furnished by the book, a quitter of offence, but by calling in the forbidden helps of rumor, gossip, conjecture, insinuation, and innuendo, he destroys her character and rehabilitates Shelley's as he believes. And in truth his unheroic work has not been barren of the results he hanged at, as witness the assertion made to me that girls in the colleges of America are taught that Harriet Shelley put a stain upon her husband's honour, and that that was what stung him into repurifying himself by deserting her and his child, and entering into scandalous relations with a school girl acquaintance of his. If that assertion is true, they probably use a reduction of this work in those colleges, maybe only a sketch outlined from it. Such a thing as that could be harmful and misleading. They ought to cast it out and put the whole book in its place. It would not deceive. It would not deceive the janitor. All of this book is interesting, on account of the sorcerer's methods and the attractiveness of some of his characters and the repulsiveness of the rest, but no part of it is so much so as are the chapters wherein he tries to think he thinks, he sets forth the causes which led to Shelley's desertion of his wife in 1814. Harriet Westbrook was a school girl 16 years old. Shelley was teeming with advanced thought. He believed that Christianity was a degrading and selfish superstition, and he had a deep and sincere desire to rescue one of his sisters from it. Harriet was impressed by his various philosophies and looked upon him as an intellectual wonder, which indeed he was. He had an idea that she could give him valuable help in his scheme regarding his sister. Therefore he asked her to correspond with him. She was quite willing. Shelley was not thinking of love, for he was just getting over a passion for his cousin, Harriet Grove, and just getting well steeped in one for Miss Hitchner, a schoolteacher. What might happen to Harriet Westbrook before the letter writing was ended did not enter his mind. Yet an older person could have made a good guess at it, for in person Shelley was as beautiful as an angel. He was frank, sweet, winning, unassuming, and so rich in unselfishness, generosity, and magnanimities, that he made his whole generation seem poor in these great qualities by comparison. Besides, he was in distress. His college had expelled him for writing an atheistical pamphlet and afflicting the reverent heads of the university with it. His rich father and grandfather had closed their purses against him. His friends were cold. Necessarily Harriet fell in love with him, and so deeply indeed that there was no way for Shelley to save her from suicide but to marry her. He believed himself to blame for this state of things, so the marriage took place. He was pretty fairly in love with Harriet, although he loved Miss Hitchner better. He wrote and explained the case to Miss Hitchner after the wedding, and he could not have been franker or more naive and less stirred up about the circumstance if the matter in issue had been a commercial transaction involving thirty-five dollars. Shelley was nineteen. He was not a youth, but a man. He had never had any youth. He was an erratic and fantastic child during eighteen years. Then he stepped into manhood, as one steps over a dorsal. He was curiously mature at nineteen in his ability to do independent thinking on the deep questions of life, and to arrive at sharply definite decisions regarding them and stick to them, stick to them and stand by them at cost of bread, friendships, esteem, respect, and approbation. For the sake of his opinions he was willing to sacrifice all these valuable things, and did sacrifice them, and went on doing it too when he could at any moment have made himself rich and supplied himself with friends and esteem by compromising with his father at the moderate expense of throwing overboard one or two indifferent details of his cargo of principles. He and Harriet eloped to Scotland and got married. They took lodgings in Edinburgh of a sort answerable to their purse, which was about empty, and there their life was a happy one, and grew daily more so. They had only themselves for company, but they needed no additions to it. They were as cozy and contented as birds in a nest. Harriet sang evenings, or read aloud. Also she studied and tried to improve her mind, her husband instructing her in Latin. She was very beautiful. She was modest, quiet, genuine, and, according to her husband's testimony, she had no fine lady heirs or aspirations about her. In Matthew Arnold's judgment she was a pleasing figure. The pair remained five weeks in Edinburgh, and then took lodgings in York, where Shelly's collegemate Hogg lived. Shelly presently ran down to London, and Hogg took this opportunity to make love to the young wife. She repulsed him, and reported the fact to her husband when he got back. It seems a pity that Shelly did not copy this creditable conduct of hers, some time or other, when under temptation, so that we might have seen the author of his biography hang the miracle in the skies and squirt rainbows at it. At the end of the first year of marriage, the most trying year for any young couple, for then the mutual failings are coming one by one to light, and the necessary adjustments are being made in pain and tribulation, Shelly was able to recognize that his marriage venture had been a safe one, as we have seen his love for his wife had begun in a rather shallow way, and with not much force, but now it was become deep and strong, which entitles his wife to a broad credit mark, one may admit. He addresses a long and loving poem to her, in which both passion and worship appear. Exhibit A. O thou whose dear love gleamed upon the gloomy path which this lone spirit traveled, will thou not turn those spirit-beaming eyes and look on me until I be assured that earth is heaven and heaven is earth? Harriet, let death all mortal ties dissolve, but ours shall not be mortal. Shelly also wrote a sonnet to her in August this same year in celebration of her birthday. Exhibit B. Ever as now with love and virtue's glow may thy unwithering soul not cease to burn, still may thine heart with those pure thoughts overflow which force from mine such quick and warm return. Was the girl of seventeen glad and proud and happy? We may conjecture that she was. That was the year 1812. Another year passed, still happily, still successfully. A child was born in June 1813, and in September, three months later, Shelly addresses a poem to this child, Ianthe, in which she points out just when the little creature is most particularly dear to him. Exhibit C. Dearest, when most thy tender traits express the image of thy mother's loveliness. Up to this point the fabulous counsel for Shelly and prosecutor of his young wife has had easy sailing, but now his trouble begins, for Shelly is getting ready to make some unpleasant history for himself, and it will be necessary to put the blame of it on the wife. Shelly had made the acquaintance of a charming, gray-haired, young-hearted Mrs. Boyneville, whose face retained a certain youthful beauty. She lived at Brocknell, and had a young daughter named Cornelia Turner, who was equipped with many fascinations. Apparently these people were sufficiently sentimental. Hogg says of Mrs. Boyneville, the greater part of her associates were odious. I generally found there two or three sentimental young butchers, an eminently philosophical tinker, and several very unsophisticated medical practitioners or medical students, all of low origin and vulgar and offensive manners. They sighed, turned up their eyes, retailed philosophy, such as it was, etc. Shelly moved to Brocknell, July 27, this is still 1813, purposely to be near this unwholesome prairie dog's nest. The fabulist says it was the entrance into a world more amiable and exquisite than he had yet known. In this acquaintance the attraction was mutual, and presently it grew to be very mutual indeed, between Shelly and Cornelia Turner, when they got to studying the Italian poets together. Shelly, responding like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment, had his chance here. It took only four days for Cornelia's attractions to begin to dim Harriet's. Shelly arrived on the 27th of July. On the 31st he wrote a sonnet to Harriet in which one detects already the little rift in the lover's lute, which had seemed to be healed or never to have gaped at all, when the later and happier sonnet to Ianthe was written, in September, we remember, exhibit D, Evening to Harriet. O thou bright sun, beneath the dark blue line of western distance that sublime descendest, and gleaming lovelier as thy beams decline, thy million hues to every vapor lendest, and over cobweb lawn and grove, and stream sheddest the liquid magic of thy light, till calm earth, with the parting splendor bright, shows like the vision of a beautyous dream. What gazer now, with astronomical eye, could coldly count the spots within nice fear? Such were thy lover, Harriet, could he fly the thoughts of all that makes his passion dear, and turning senseless from thy warm caress, pick flaws in our close woven happiness? I cannot find the rift, still it may be there. What the poem seems to say is that a person would be coldly ungrateful, who could consent to count and consider little spots and flaws in such a warm, great, satisfying sun as Harriet is. It is a little rift which had seemed to be healed, or never to have gaped at all. That is, one detects a little rift which perhaps had never existed. How does one do that? How does one see the invisible? It is the fabulous secret. He knows how to detect what does not exist. He knows how to see what is not seeable. It is his gift, and he works it many a time to poor dead Harriet Shelley's deep damage. As yet, however, if there was a speck upon Shelley's happiness, it was no more than a speck. Meaning the one which one detects, where it may never have gaped at all, nor had Harriet cause for discontent. Shelley's Latin instructions to his wife had ceased. From a teacher he had now become a pupil. Mrs. Boynville and her young married daughter Cornelia were teaching him Italian poetry, a fact which warns one to receive with some caution that other statement that Harriet had no cause for discontent. Shelley had stopped instructing Harriet in Latin, as before mentioned. The biographer thinks that the busy life in London, some time back, and the intrusion of the baby account for this. These were hindrances, but were there no others? He is always overlooking a detail here and there that might be valuable in helping us understand a situation. For instance, when a man has been hard at work at the Italian poets with a pretty woman, hour after hour, and responding like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment in the meantime, that man is dog tired when he gets home, and he can't teach his wife Latin. It would be unreasonable to expect it. Up to this time we have submitted to having Mrs. Boynville pushed upon us as ostensibly concerned in these Italian lessons, but the biographer drops her now of his own accord. Cornelia, perhaps, is soul teacher. Hogg says she was a prey to a kind of sweet melancholy arising from causes purely imaginary. She required consolation and found it in Petrarch. He also says Bish entered at once fully into her views and caught the soft infection, breathing the tenderest and sweetest melancholy as every true poet ought. Then the author of the book interlards a most stately and fine compliment to Cornelia, furnished by a man of approved judgment who knew her well in later years. It is a very good compliment indeed, and she no doubt deserved it in her later years, when she had, for generations, ceased to be sentimental and lackadaisical, and was no longer engaged in enchanting young husbands and sowing sorrow for young wives. But why is that compliment to that old gentlewoman intruded there? Is it to make the reader believe she was well chosen and safe society for a young sentimental husband? The biographer's device was not well planned. That old person was not present. It was her other self that was there, her young, sentimental, melancholy, warm-blooded self in those early sweet times before antiquity had cooled her off and mossed her back. In choosing for friends such women as Mrs. Newton, Mrs. Boynville, and Cornelia Turner, Shelley gave good proof of his insight and discrimination. That is the fabulous opinion. Harriet Shelley's is not reported. Early in August Shelley was in London trying to raise money. In September he wrote the poem to the baby already quoted from. In the first week of October Shelley and family went to Warwick, then to Edinburgh, arriving there about the middle of the month. Harriet was happy. Why? The author furnishes a reason, but hides from us whether it is history or conjecture. It is because the babe had borne the journey well. It has all the aspect of one of his artful devices, flung in, in his favourite casual way, the way he has when he wants to draw one's attention away from an obvious thing and amuse it with some trifle that is less obvious but more useful in a history like this. The obvious thing is that Harriet was happy because there was much territory between her husband and Cornelia Turner now, and because the perilous Italian lessons were taking a rest, and because if there a chance to be any respondings like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment in stock in these days, she might hope to get a share of them herself, and because with her husband liberated now from the fetid fascinations of that sentimental retreat so pitilessly described by Hogg, who also dubbed it Shelley's Paradise later, she might hope to persuade him to stay away from it permanently, and because she might also hope that his brain would cool now, and his heart become healthy, and both brain and heart consider the situation and resolve that it would be a right and manly thing to stand by this girl, wife, and her child, and see that they were honourably dealt with, and cherished, and protected, and loved by the man that had promised these things, and so be made happy and kept so, and because also, may we conjecture this, we may hope for the privilege of taking up our cozy Latin lessons again that used to be so pleasant and brought us so near together, so near indeed that often our heads touched, just as heads do over Italian lessons, and our hands met in casual and unintentional, but still most delicious and thrilling little contacts and momentary clasps, just as they inevitably do over Italian lessons. Suppose one should say to any young wife, I find that your husband is poring over the Italian poets and being instructed in the beautiful Italian language by the lovely Cornelia Robinson. Would that cozy picture fail to rise before her mind? Would its possibilities fail to suggest themselves to her? Would there be a pang in her heart, and a blush on her face? Or, on the contrary, would the remark give her pleasure, make her joyous and gay? Why, one needs only to make the experiment. The result will not be uncertain. However, we learn, by authority of deeply reasoned and searching conjecture, that the baby bore the journey well, and that that was why the young wife was happy. That accounts for two percent of the happiness, but it was not right to imply that it accounted for the other ninety-eight also. Peacock, a scholar, poet, and friend of the Shelleys, was of their party when they went away. He used to laugh at the Boyneville menagerie, and was not a favourite. One of the Boyneville group, writing to Hogg, said, The Shelleys have made an addition to their party in the person of a cold scholar, who, I think, has neither taste nor feeling. This Shelleys will perceive sooner or later for his warm nature craves sympathy. True, and Shelleys will fight his way back there to get it. There will be no way to head him off. Towards the end of November it was necessary for Shelleys to pay a business visit to London, and he conceived the project of leaving Harriet and the baby in Edinburgh, with Harriet's sister Eliza Westbrook, a sensible, practical maiden lady, about thirty years old, who had spent a great part of her time with the family since the marriage. She was an estimable woman, and Shelleys had had reason to like her, and did like her. But along about this time his feeling towards her changed. Part of Shelleys' plan, as he wrote Hogg, was to spend his London evenings with the Newtons, members of the Boyneville Hysterical Society. But alas, when he arrived early in December, that pleasant game was partially blocked, for Eliza and the family arrived with him. We are left destitute of conjectures at this point by the biographer, and it is my duty to supply one. I chanced the conjecture that it was Eliza who interfered with that game. I think she tried to do what she could towards modifying the Boyneville connection in the interest of her young sister's peace and honour. If it was she who blocked that game, she was not strong enough to block the next one. Before the month and year were out, no date given, let us call it Christmas, Shelleys and family were nested in a furnished house in Windsor, at no great distance from the Boyneville's. These decoys still residing at Bracknell. What we need now is a misleading conjecture. We get it with characteristic promptness and depravity. But Prince Athanas found not the aged Zoneras, the friend of his boyhood, in any wanderings to Windsor. Dr. Lind had died a year since, and with his death Windsor must have lost, for Shelleys, its chief attraction. Still not to mention Shelleys' wife, there was Bracknell at any rate. While Bracknell remains, all solace is not lost. Shelleys is represented by this biographer as doing a great many careless things, but to my mind this hiring a furnished house for three months in order to be with a man who has been dead a year is the carelessest of them all. One feels for him, that is but natural, and does us honour besides, yet one is vexed for all that. He could have written and asked about the aged Zoneras before taking the house. He may not have had the address, but that is nothing. Any postman would know the aged Zoneras. A dead postman would remember a name like that. And yet, why throw a rag like this to us, ravining wolves? Is it seriously supposable that we will stop to chew it and let our prey escape? No. We are getting to expect this kind of device, and to give it merely a sniff for certainty's sake, and then walk around it and leave it lying. Shelleys was not after the aged Zoneras. He was pointed for Cornelia and the Italian lessons, for his warm nature was craving sympathy. End of Part 1 of In Defense of Harriet Shelley, read by John Greenman. Section 3 of How to Tell a Story and Other Essays by Mark Twain This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. How to Tell a Story and Other Essays by Mark Twain. Chapter 2 In Defense of Harriet Shelley, Part 2 The year 1813 is just ended now, and we step into 1814. To recapitulate how much of Cornelia's society has Shelley had thus far. Portions of August and September and four days of July. That is to say, he has had opportunity to enjoy it, more or less, during that brief period. Did he want some more of it? We must fall back upon history, and then go to conjecturing. In the early part of the year 1814 Shelley was a frequent visitor at Brocknell. Frequent is a cautious word in this author's mouth. The very cautiousness of it, the vagueness of it, provokes suspicion. It makes one suspect that this frequency was more frequent than the mere common everyday kinds of frequency, which one is in the habit of averaging up with the unassuming term frequent. I think so, because they fixed up a bedroom for him in the Boineville house. One doesn't need a bedroom if one is only going to run over now and then in a disconnected way to respond like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment and rub up one's Italian poetry a little. The young wife was not invited, perhaps. If she was, she most certainly did not come, or she would have straightened the room up. The most ignorant of us knows that a wife would not endure a room in the condition in which Hogg found this one when he occupied it one night. Shelley was away, why nobody can divine. Clothes were scattered about. There were books on every side. Wherever a book could be laid was an open book turned down on its face to keep its place. It seems plain that the wife was not invited. No, not that. I think she was invited, but said to herself that she could not bear to go there and see another young woman touching heads with her husband over an Italian book and making thrilling hand contacts with him accidentally. As remarked, he was a frequent visitor there, where he found an easeful resting place in the house of Mrs. Boynville, the white-haired Maimuna and of her daughter, Mrs. Turner. The aged Zoneras was deceased, but the white-haired Maimuna was still on deck as we see. Three charming ladies entertained the mocker, Hogg, with cups of tea, late hours, Wilens Agathon, sighs and smiles, and the celestial manner of refined sentiment. Such, says Hogg, were the delights of Shelley's paradise in Bracknell. The white-haired Maimuna presently writes to Hogg, I will not have you despise homespun pleasures. Shelley is making a trial of them with us. A trial of them? It may be called that. It was March eleventh, and he had been in the house a month. She continues, Shelley likes them so well that he is resolved to leave off rambling. But he has already left it off. He has been there a month, and begin a course of them himself. But he has already begun it. He has been at it a month. He likes it so well that he has forgotten all about his wife as a letter of his reveals. Seriously, I think his mind and body want rest. Yet he has been resting both for a month, with Italian and tea, and manner of sentiment, and late hours, and every restful thing a young husband could need for the refreshment of weary limbs, and a sore conscience, and a nagging sense of shabbiness and treachery. His journeys after what he has never found have wracked his purse and his tranquillity. He is resolved to take a little care of the former in pity to the latter, which I applaud, and shall second with all my might. But she does not say whether the young wife, a stranger and lonely yonder, wants another woman and her daughter Cornelia to be lavishing so much inflamed interest on her husband or not. That young wife is always silent. We are never allowed to hear from her. She must have opinions about such things. She cannot be indifferent. She must be approving or disapproving. Surely she would speak if she were allowed, even today, and from her grave she would, if she could, I think. But we get only the other side. They keep her silent always. He has deeply interested us. In the course of your intimacy he must have made you feel what we now feel for him. He is seeking a house close to us. Ah! He is not close enough yet, it seems. And if he succeeds, we shall have an additional motive to induce him to come among us in the summer. The reader would puzzle a long time and not guess the biographer's comment upon the above letter. It is this. These sound like words of a considerate and judicious friend. And that is what he thinks. That is, it is what he thinks, he thinks. No, that is not quite it. It is what he thinks he can stupefy a particularly and unspeakably dull reader into thinking it is what he thinks. He makes that comment with the knowledge that Shelley is in love with this woman's daughter, and that it is because of the fascinations of these two that Shelley has deserted his wife for this month, considering all the circumstances, and his new passion, and his employment of the time, amounted to desertion, that is its rightful name. We cannot know how the wife regarded it and felt about it, but if she could have read the letter which Shelley was writing to Hogg four or five days later, we could guess her thought and how she felt. Hear him. I have been staying with Mrs. Boyneville for the last month. I have escaped in the society of all that philosophy and friendship combined from the dismaying solitude of myself. It is fair to conjecture that he was feeling ashamed. They have revived in my heart the expiring flame of life. I have felt myself translated to a paradise which has nothing of mortality but its transitoryness. My heart sickens at the view of that necessity which will quickly divide me from the delightful tranquillity of this happy home for it has become my home. Eliza is still with us, not here, but will be with me when the infinite malice of destiny forces me to depart. Eliza is she who blocked that game, the game in London, the one where we were proposing to dine every night with one of the three charming ladies who fed tea and manna and late hours to Hogg at Bracknell. Shelley could send Eliza away, of course, could have cleared her out long ago, if so minded, just as he had previously done with a predecessor of hers whom he had first worshiped and then turned against. But perhaps she was useful there as a thin excuse for staying away himself. I am now but little inclined to contest this point. I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul. It is a sight which awakens an inexpressible sensation of disgust and horror to see her caress my poor little Ianthi, in whom I may hereafter find the consolation of sympathy. I sometimes feel faint with the fatigue of checking the overflowing of my unbounded abhorrence for this miserable wretch. But she is no more than a blind and loathsome worm that cannot see to sting. I have begun to learn Italian again. Cornelia assists me in this language. Did I not once tell you that I thought her cold and reserved? She is the reverse of this, as she is the reverse of everything bad. She inherits all the divinity of her mother. I have sometimes forgotten that I am not an inmate of this delightful home, that a time will come which will cast me again into the boundless ocean of abhorred society. I have written nothing but one stanza, which has no meaning, and that I have only written in thought. Thy dewy looks sink in my breast, Thy gentle words stir poison there. Thou hast disturbed the only rest that was the portion of despair. Subdued to duty's hard control, I could have borne my wayward lot, the chains that bind this reigned soul had cankered then, but crushed it not. This is the vision of a delirious and distempered dream which passes away at the cold clear light of mourning. Its surpassing excellence and exquisite perfections have no more reality than the color of an autumnal sunset. Then it did not refer to his wife. That is plain, otherwise he would have said so. It is well that he explained that it has no meaning, for if he had not done that, the previous soft references to Cornelia, and the way he has come to feel about her now, would make us think she was the person who had inspired it while teaching him how to read the warm and ruddy Italian poets during a month. The biography observes that portions of this letter read like the tired moaning of a wounded creature. Guesses that the nature of the wound are permissible. We will hazard one. Read by the light of Shelley's previous history, his letter seems to be the cry of a tortured conscience. Until this time it was a conscience that had never felt a pang or known a smirch. It was the conscience of one who, until this time, had never done a dishonorable thing or an ungenerous or cruel or treacherous thing, but was now doing all of these, and was keenly aware of it. Up to this time Shelley had been master of his nature, and it was a nature which was as beautiful and as nearly perfect as any merely human nature may be. But he was drunk now with a debasing passion, and was not himself. There is nothing in his previous history that is in character with the Shelley of this letter. He had done boyish things, foolish things, even crazy things, but never a thing to be ashamed of. He had done things which one might laugh at, but the privilege of laughing was limited always to the thing itself. You could not laugh at the motive back of it. That was high. That was noble. His most fantastic and quixotic acts had a purpose back of them, which made them fine, often great, and made the rising laugh seem profanation, and quenched it. Quenched it, and changed the impulse to homage. Up to this time he had been loyalty itself, where his obligations lay. Treachery was new to him. He had never done an ignoble thing. Baseness was new to him. He had never done an unkind thing. That also was new to him. This was the author of that letter. This was the man who had deserted his young wife and was lamenting, because he must leave another woman's house, which had become a home to him, and go away. Is he lamenting mainly because he must go back to his wife and child? No, the lament is mainly for what he is to leave behind him. The physical comforts of the house? No, in his life he had never attached importance to such things. Then the thing which he grieves to leave is narrowed down to a person. To the person whose dewy looks had sunk into his breast, and whose seducing words had stirred poison there. He was ashamed of himself. His conscience was upbraiding him. He was the slave of a degrading love. He was drunk with his passion. The real Shelley was in temporary eclipse. This is the verdict which his previous history must certainly deliver upon this episode, I think. One must be allowed to assist himself with conjectures like these when trying to find his way through a literary swamp which has so many misleading fingerboards up as this book is furnished with. We have now arrived at a part of the swamp where the difficulties and perplexities are going to be greater than any we have yet met with, where indeed the fingerboards are multitudinous and the most of them pointing diligently in the wrong direction. We are to be told by the biography why Shelley deserted his wife and child and took up with Cornelia Turner and Italian. It was not on account of Cornelia's size and sensibilities and tea and manor and late hours and soft and sweet and industrious enticements. No, it was because his happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to death. It had been wounded and bruised almost to death in this way. First, Harriet persuaded him to set up a carriage. Second, after the intrusion of the baby, Harriet stopped reading aloud and studying. Third, Harriet's walks with hog commonly conducted us to some fashionable bonnet shop. Fourth, Harriet hired a wet nurse. Fifth, when an operation was being performed upon the baby Harriet stood by narrowly observing all that was done but to the astonishment of the operator betraying not the smallest sign of emotion. Sixth, Eliza Westbrook, sister-in-law, was still of the household. The evidence against Harriet Shelley is all in. There is no more. Upon these six counts she stands indicted of the crime of driving her husband into that stye at Bracknell. And this crime, by these helps, the biographical prosecuting attorney has set himself the task of proogving upon her. Does the biographer call himself the attorney for the prosecution? No. Only to himself privately. Publicly he is the passionless, disinterested, impartial judge on the bench. He holds up his judicial stales before the world, that all may see, and it all tries to look so fair that a blind person would sometimes fail to see him slip the false weights in. Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to death. First, because Harriet had persuaded him to set up a carriage. I cannot discover that any evidence is offered that she asked him to set up a carriage. Still, if she did, was it a heavy offence? Was it unique? Other young wives had committed it before. Others have committed it since. Shelley had dearly loved her in those London days. Possibly he set up the carriage gladly to please her. Affectionate young husbands do such things. When Shelley ran away with another girl by and by, this girl persuaded him to pour the price of many carriages and many horses down the bottomless well of her father's debts. But this impartial judge finds no fault with that. Once she appeals to Shelley to raise money, necessarily by borrowing, there was no other way, to pay her father's debts with at a time when Shelley was in danger of being arrested and imprisoned for his own debts. Yet the good judge finds no fault with her, even for this. First and last, Shelley emptied into that rapacious mendicant's lap a sum which cost him, for he borrowed it at ruinous rates, from eighty to one hundred thousand dollars. But it was Mary Godwin's papa. The supplications were often sent through Mary. The good judge is Mary's strenuous friend, so Mary gets no censures. On the Continent Mary rode in her private carriage, built, as Shelley boasts, by one of the best makers in Bond Street. Yet the good judge makes not even a passing comment on this iniquity. Let us throw out Count Number One against Harriet Shelley, as being far fetched and frivolous. Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to death, secondly because Harriet's studies had dwindled away to nothing. Bish had ceased to express any interest in them. At what time was this? It was when Harriet had fully recovered from the fatigue of her first effort of maternity, and was now in full force, vigor, and effect. Very well. The baby was born two days before the close of June. It took the mother a month to get back her full force, vigor, and effect. This brings us to July 27th and the deadly Cornelia. If a wife of eighteen is studying with her husband, and he gets smitten with another woman, isn't he likely to lose interest in his wife's studies for that reason, and is not his wife's interest in her studies likely to languish for the same reason? Would not the mere sight of those books of hers sharpen the pain that is in her heart? This sudden breaking down of a mutual intellectual interest of two years standing is coincident with Shelley's re-encounter with Cornelia, and we are allowed to gather from that time forth for nearly two months. He did all his studying in that person's society. We feel at liberty to rule out count number two from the indictment against Harriet. Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to death. Thirdly, because Harriet's walks with hog commonly led to some fashionable bonnet shop. I offer no paliation. I only ask why the dispassionate impartial judge did not offer one himself. Nearly, I mean, to offset his leniency in a similar case or two where the girl who ran away with Harriet's husband was the shopper. There are several occasions where she interested herself with shopping, among them being walks which ended at the bonnet shop, yet in none of these cases does she get a word of blame from the good judge, while in one of them he covers the deed with a justifying remark, she doing the shopping that time to find easement for her mind, her child having died. Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to death. Fourthly, by the introduction there of a wet nurse. The wet nurse was introduced at the time of the Ettenborough sojourn immediately after Shelley had been enjoying the two months of study with Cornelia, which broke up his wife's studies and destroyed his personal interest in them. Why, by this time, nothing that Shelley's wife could do would have been satisfactory to him, for he was in love with another woman, and was never going to be contented again until he got back to her. If he had been still in love with his wife, it is not easily conceivable that he would care much who nursed the baby. Provided the baby was well nursed. Harriet's jealousy was assuredly voicing itself now. Shelley's conscience was assuredly nagging him, pestering him, persecuting him. Shelley needed excuses for his altered attitude towards his wife. Providence pitied him and sent the wet nurse. If Providence had sent him a cotton doughnut, it would have answered just as well. All he wanted was something to find fault with. Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to death. Fifthly, because Harriet narrowly watched a surgical operation which was being performed upon her child, and, to the astonishment of the operator, who was watching Harriet instead of attending to his operation, she betrayed not the smallest sign of emotion. The author of this biography was not ashamed to set down that exultant slander. He was, apparently, not aware that it was a small business to bring into his court a witness whose name he does not know, and whose character and veracity there is none to vouch for, and allow him to strike this blow at the mother-heart of this friendless girl. The biographer says, We may not infer from this that Harriet did not feel. Why put it in, then? But we learned that those about her could believe her to be hard and insensible. Who were those who were about her? Her husband? He hated her now, because he was in love elsewhere. Her sister? Of course, that is not charged. Peacock? Peacock does not testify. The wet nurse? She does not testify. If any others were there, we have no mention of them. Those about her are reduced to one person, her husband. Who reports the circumstance? It is Hogg. Perhaps he was there. We do not know. But if he was, he still got his information at second hand, as it was the operator who noticed Harriet's lack of emotion, not himself. Hogg is not given to saying kind things when Harriet is his subject. He may have said them the time that he tried to tempt her to soil her honour, but after that he mentions her usually with a sneer. Among those who were about her was one witness well equipped to silence all tongues, abolish all doubts, set our minds at rest, one witness, not called and not callable, whose evidence, if we could but get it, would outweigh the oaths of whole battalions of hostile hogs and nameless surgeons, the baby. I wish we had the baby's testimony, and yet if we had it, it would not do us any good. A furtive conjecture, a sly insinuation, a pious if or to, would be smuggled in, here and there, with a solemn air of judicial investigation and its positiveness would wilt into dubiety. The biographer says of Harriet, if words of tender affection and motherly pride proved the reality of love, then, undoubtedly, she loved her firstborn child. That is, if mere empty words can prove it, it stands proved. And in this way, without committing himself, he gives the reader a chance to infer that there isn't any extant evidence but words, and that he doesn't take much stock in them. How seldom, he shows his hand, he is always looking behind a non-committal if, or something of that kind, always gliding and dodging around, distributing colorless poison here and there and everywhere, but always leaving himself in a position to say that his language will be found innocuous if taken to pieces and examined. He clearly exhibits a steady and never-relaxing purpose to make Harriet the scapegoat for her husband's first great sin, but it is in the general view that this is revealed, not in the details. His insidious literature is like blue water. You know what it is that makes it blue, but you can produce and verify any detail of the cloud of microscopic dust in it that does it. Your adversary can dip up a glassful and show you that it is pure white, and you cannot deny it. And he can dip the lake dry, glass by glass, and show that every glassful is white, and prove it to any one's eye. And yet that lake was blue, and you can swear it. This book is blue with slander in solution. Let the reader examine, for example, the paragraph of comment which immediately follows the letter containing Shelly's self-exposure which we have been considering. This is it. One should inspect the individual sentences as they go by, then pass them in procession and review the cake-walk as a whole. Shelly's happiness in his home, as is evident from this pathetic letter, had been fatally stricken. It is evident also that he knew where duty lay. He felt that his part was to take up his burden silently and sorrowfully, and to bear it henceforth with the quietness of despair. But we can perceive that he scarcely possessed the strength and fortitude needful for success in such an attempt. And clearly Shelly himself was aware how perilous it was to accept that respite of blissful ease which he enjoyed in the Boynville household. For gentle voices and dewy looks and words of sympathy could not fail to remind him of an ideal of tranquility or of joy which could never be his, and which he must henceforth sternly exclude from his imagination. That paragraph commits the author in no way. Taken sentence by sentence, it asserts nothing against anybody, or in favour of anybody, pleads for nobody, accuses nobody. Taken detail by detail, it is as innocent as moonshine, and yet, taken as a whole, it is a design against the reader. Its intent is to remove the feeling which the letter must leave with him if let alone, and put a different one in its place, to remove a feeling justified by the letter, and substitute one not justified by it. The letter itself gives you no uncertain picture, no lecturer is needed to stand by with a stick and point out its details, and let on to explain what they mean. The picture is the very clear and remorsefully faithful picture of a fallen and fettered angel who is ashamed of himself, an angel who beats his soiled wings and cries, who complains to the woman who enticed him that he could have borne his wayward lot, he could have stood by his duty, if it had not been for her beguilements, an angel who rails at the boundless ocean of abhorred society, and rages at his poor judicious sister-in-law. If there is any dignity about this spectacle, it will escape most people. Yet when the paragraph of comment is taken as a whole, the picture is full of dignity and pathos. We have before us a blameless and noble spirit stricken to the earth by malign powers, but not conquered, tempted, but grandly putting the temptation away, and meshed by subtle coils, but sternly resolved to rend them and march forth victorious at any peril of life or limb. Curtain, slow music! Was it the purpose of the paragraph to take the bad taste of Shelley's letter out of the reader's mouth? If that was not it, good ink was wasted. Without that it has no relevancy. The multiplication table would have padded the space as rationally. We have inspected the six reasons which we are asked to believe drove a man of conspicuous patience, honor, justice, fairness, kindliness, and iron-firmness, resolution, and steadfastness, from the wife whom he loved and who loved him, to a refuge in the mephitic paradise of Bracknell. These are six infinitely little reasons, but there were six colossal ones, and these the counsel for the destruction of Harriet Shelley persists in not considering very important. Moreover, the colossal six preceded the little six, and had done the mischief before they were born. Let us double column the twelve. Then we shall see at a glance that each little reason is in turn answered by a retorting reason of a size to overshadow it and make it insignificant. One. Harriet sets up carriage. One. Cornelia Turner. Two. Harriet stops studying. Two. Cornelia Turner. Three. Harriet goes to bonnet shop. Three. Cornelia Turner. Four. Harriet takes a wet nurse. Four. Cornelia Turner. Five. Harriet has too much nerve. Five. Cornelia Turner. Six. Detested sister-in-law. Six. Cornelia Turner. As soon as we comprehend that Cornelia Turner and the Italian lessons happened before the little six had been discovered to be grievances, we understand why Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to death, and no one can persuade us into laying it on Harriet. Shelley and Cornelia are the responsible persons, and we cannot in honor and decency allow the cruelties which they practiced upon the unoffending wife to be pushed aside in order to give us a chance to waste time and tears over six sentimental justifications of an offense which the six can't justify, nor even respectably assist in justifying. Six? There were seven, but in charity to the biographer, the seventh ought not to be exposed. Still, he hung it out himself, and not only hung it out, but thought it was a good point in Shelley's favor. For two years Shelley found sympathy and intellectual food and all that at home. There was enough for spiritual and mental support, but not enough for luxury, and so at the end of the contented two years this latter detail justifies him in going bag and baggage over to Cornelia Turner, and supplying the rest of his need in the way of surplus sympathy and intellectual pie unlawfully, by the same reasoning a man in merely comfortable circumstances may rob a bank without sin. End of part two of In Defense of Harriet Shelley, read by John Greenman.