Literature Relating to Staten Island 151 



element in the fabric, while shrewd old I'ncle Shamus with his 

 Celtic sense of humor, and the good, whole-souled priest, Father 

 Carew, serve to smooth out some of the rough places. The tenets 

 of the Roman Catholic Church, and their influence on the social 

 and family life of its communicants, are lightly touched upon 

 and are factors in the development of the plot; hut in its cul- 

 mination the author has taken advantage of the license of fiction 

 and has ignored the commonly accepted attitude of the Church 

 in regard to divorce, in order that the principal characters may 

 be happily married. A hypercritical reader may also take ex- 

 ception to the description of a certain natural phenomenon which 

 is said to have obtained " late one afternoon in the last of June," 

 when " the giant shadows of great trees stretched toward the 

 empty east where hung a moon thin as a wafer." How the 

 moon — and apparently a full moon at that — could be visible in 

 the " empty " east above the horizon before sunset is not, how- 

 ever, much more difficult to understand than Rider Haggard's 

 description, in King Solomon's Mines, of a crescent or new moon 

 peeping above the eastern horizcjn after the sun had set, or his 

 subsequent description of a full moon rising about ten o'clock 

 at night. Charlotte Bront6, in Jane Ityre, was also guilty of 

 making the crescent moon rise in the evening, and even Robert 

 Louis Stevenson made a similar lunar error in connection with 

 two o'clock in the morning, so our author is in good company 

 in regard to peculiar astronomical observations. 



If any readers think they can identify certain of the characters 

 with living personalities, or certain of the incidents with actual 

 occurrences in our local social life, that is a privilege which can 

 not be denied them; but it is something which the reviewer does 

 not feel called upon to discuss. Many of the locality features 

 arc, however, readily recognizable by those who are familiar with 

 our county seat and the highways and byways adjacent to it; 

 and the old mill at the head of Fresh Kills, the picturesque old 

 farmhouse and orchard near by, " St. Anne's " church, the 

 ' Southmarsh " road, the relatively distant " Grandville," etc., 

 with the facts and traditions connected with them, now possess 



