"Well, it seems they had a huge spree in the city of Mexico," said Dodd;
"and then Hadden and the Irishman took a turn at the gold fields in
Venezuela, and Wicks went on alone to Valparaiso. There's a Kirkup in
the Chilean navy to this day, I saw the name in the papers about the
Balmaceda war. Hadden soon wearied of the mines, and I met him the other
day in Sydney. The last news he had from Venezuela, Mac had been knocked
over in an attack on the gold train. So there's only the three of them
left, for Amalu scarcely counts. He lives on his own land in Maui, at
the side of Hale-a-ka-la, where he keeps Goddedaal's canary; and they
say he sticks to his dollars, which is a wonder in a Kanaka. He had
a considerable pile to start with, for not only Hemstead's share but
Carthew's was divided equally among the other four--Mac being counted."

"What did that make for him altogether?" I could not help asking, for I
had been diverted by the number of calculations in his narrative.

"One hundred and twenty-eight pounds nineteen shillings and eleven pence
halfpenny," he replied with composure. "That's leaving out what little
he won at Van John. It's something for a Kanaka, you know."

And about that time we were at last obliged to yield to the
solicitations of our native admirers, and go to the pastor's house to
drink green cocoanuts. The ship I was in was sailing the same night, for
Dodd had been beforehand and got all the shell in the island; and though
he pressed me to desert and return with him to Auckland (whither he was
now bound to pick up Carthew) I was firm in my refusal.

The truth is, since I have been mixed up with Havens and Dodd in the
design to publish the latter's narrative, I seem to feel no want for
Carthew's society. Of course I am wholly modern in sentiment, and think
nothing more noble than to publish people's private affairs at so much a
line. They like it, and if they don't, they ought to. But a still small
voice keeps telling me they will not like it always, and perhaps not
always stand it. Memory besides supplies me with the face of a pressman
(in the sacred phrase) who proved altogether too modern for one of his
neighbours, and


     Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum

as it were, marshalling us our way. I am in no haste to

     --nos proecedens--

be that man's successor. Carthew has a record as "a clane shot," and for
some years Samoa will be good enough for me.

We agreed to separate, accordingly; but he took me on board in his own
boat with the hard-wood fittings, and entertained me on the way with
an account of his late visit to Butaritari, whither he had gone on
an errand for Carthew, to see how Topelius was getting along, and, if
necessary, to give him a helping hand. But Topelius was in great force,
and had patronised and--well--out-manoeuvred him.

"Carthew will be pleased," said Dodd; "for there's no doubt they
oppressed the man abominably when they were in the Currency Lass. It's
diamond cut diamond now."


This, I think, was the most of the news I got from my friend Loudon; and
I hope I was well inspired, and have put all the questions to which you
would be curious to hear an answer.

But there is one more that I daresay you are burning to put to myself;
and that is, what your own name is doing in this place, cropping up (as
it were uncalled-for) on the stern of our poor ship? If you were not
born in Arcadia, you linger in fancy on its margin; your thoughts are
busied with the flutes of antiquity, with daffodils, and the classic
poplar, and the footsteps of the nymphs, and the elegant and moving
aridity of ancient art. Why dedicate to you a tale of a caste
so modern;--full of details of our barbaric manners and unstable
morals;--full of the need and the lust of money, so that there is scarce
a page in which the dollars do not jingle;--full of the unrest and
movement of our century, so that the reader is hurried from place to
place and sea to sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama--in
the end, as blood-bespattered as an epic?

Well, you are a man interested in all problems of art, even the most
vulgar; and it may amuse you to hear the genesis and growth of _The
Wrecker_. On board the schooner Equator, almost within sight of the
Johnstone Islands (if anybody knows where these are) and on a moonlit
night when it was a joy to be alive, the authors were amused with
several stories of the sale of wrecks. The subject tempted them; and
they sat apart in the alley-way to discuss its possibilities. "What a
tangle it would make," suggested one, "if the wrong crew were aboard.
But how to get the wrong crew there?"--"I have it!" cried the other;
"the so-and-so affair!" For not so many months before, and not so many
hundred miles from where we were then sailing, a proposition almost
tantamount to that of Captain Trent had been made by a British skipper
to some British castaways.

Before we turned in, the scaffolding of the tale had been put together.
But the question of treatment was as usual more obscure. We had long
been at once attracted and repelled by that very modern form of the
police novel or mystery story, which consists in beginning your yarn
anywhere but at the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the
end; attracted by its peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar
difficulties that attend its execution; repelled by that appearance
of insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable
drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clews,
receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless,
elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling, but
insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art. It seemed
the cause might lie partly in the abrupt attack; and that if the tale
were gradually approached, some of the characters introduced (as it
were) beforehand, and the book started in the tone of a novel of manners
and experience briefly treated, this defect might be lessened and our
mystery seem to inhere in life. The tone of the age, its movement, the
mingling of races and classes in the dollar hunt, the fiery and not
quite unromantic struggle for existence with its changing trades and
scenery, and two types in particular, that of the American handy-man of
business and that of the Yankee merchant sailor--we agreed to dwell upon
at some length, and make the woof to our not very precious warp. Hence
Dodd's father, and Pinkerton, and Nares, and the Dromedary picnics, and
the railway work in New South Wales--the last an unsolicited testimonial
from the powers that be, for the tale was half written before I saw
Carthew's squad toil in the rainy cutting at South Clifton, or heard
from the engineer of his "young swell." After we had invented at some
expense of time this method of approaching and fortifying our police
novel, it occurred to us it had been invented previously by some one
else, and was in fact--however painfully different the results may
seem--the method of Charles Dickens in his later work.

I see you staring. Here, you will say, is a prodigious quantity of
theory to our halfpenny worth of police novel; and withal not a shadow
of an answer to your question.

Well, some of us like theory. After so long a piece of practice, these
may be indulged for a few pages. And the answer is at hand. It was
plainly desirable, from every point of view of convenience and contrast,
that our hero and narrator should partly stand aside from those with
whom he mingles, and be but a pressed-man in the dollar hunt. Thus it
was that Loudon Dodd became a student of the plastic arts, and that our
globe-trotting story came to visit Paris and look in at Barbizon. And
thus it is, dear Low, that your name appears in the address of this
epilogue.

For sure, if any person can here appreciate and read between the lines,
it must be you--and one other, our friend. All the dominos will be
transparent to your better knowledge; the statuary contract will be to
you a piece of ancient history; and you will not have now heard for the
first time of the dangers of Roussillon. Dead leaves from the Bas Breau,
echoes from Lavenue's and the Rue Racine, memories of a common past, let
these be your bookmarkers as you read. And if you care for naught else
in the story, be a little pleased to breathe once more for a moment the
airs of our youth.

The End.