204 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
heroine—from the standpoint of the ordinary man 
who is not an ophiologist; the true and the false 
about the serpent would have been blended in his 
tale as they exist blended in the popular imagina- 
tion, and the illusion would have been more perfect 
and the effect greater. 
Elsie’s biographer appears to have found his 
stock of materials bearing on the main point too 
slender for his purpose, and to fill out his work he 
is obliged to be very discursive. Meanwhile, the 
reader’s interest in the chief figure is so intense 
that in following it the best breakfast-table talk 
comes in as a mere impertinence. There is no 
other interest; among the other personages of the 
story Elsie appears like a living palpitating being 
among shadows. One finds it difficult to recall the 
names of the scholarly father in his library; the 
good hero and his lady-love; the pale school- 
mistress, and the melodramatic villain on his 
black horse, to say nothing of the vulgar villagers 
and the farmer, some of them supposed to be 
comic. If we except the rattlesnake mountain, 
and the old nurse with her animal-like affection 
and fidelity, there is no atmosphere, or, if an 
atmosphere, one which is certainly wrong and 
produces a sense of incongruity. A better artist 
—Hawthorne, to wit—would have used the painful 
mystery of Elsie’s life, and the vague sense of some 
nameless impending horror, not merely to put 
sombre patches here and there on an _ otherwise 
sunny landscape, but to give a tone to the whole 
