satisfaction in “A Modern Instance.” I have there come closest to American life as I know it.

Boyesen. But in “Silas Lapham” it seems to me that you have got a still firmer grip on American reality.

Howells. Perhaps. Still I prefer “A Modern Instance.” “Silas Lapham” is the most successful novel I have published, except “A Hazard of New Fortunes,” which has sold nearly twice as many copies as any of the rest.

Boyesen. What do you attribute that to?

Howells. Possibly to the fact that the scene is laid in New York; the public throughout the country is far more interested in New York than in Boston. New York, as Lowell once said, is a huge pudding, and every town and village has been helped to a slice, or wants to be.

Boyesen. I rejoice that New York has found such a subtly appreciative and faithful chronicler as you show yourself to be in “A Hazard of New Fortunes.” To the equipment of a great city—a world-city as the Germans say—belongs a great novelist; that is to say, at least one. And even though your modesty may rebel, I shall persist in regarding you henceforth as the novelist par excellence of New York.

Howells. Ah, you don’t expect me to live up to that bit of taffy!

It lay in the sharp angle of a wooded shore near Pontiac. When the river was high it had all the temper of a maelstrom, but in the hot summer, when the logs had ceased to run, and the river wallowed idly away to the rapids, it was like a molten mirror which, with the regularity of a pulse, resolved itself into a funnel, as though somewhere beneath 13 there was a blowhole. It had a look of hunger. Even the children noticed that, and they fed it with many things. What it passed into its rumbling bowels you never saw again. You threw a stick upon the shivering surface, and you saw it travel, first slowly, then very swiftly, round and round the sides, till the throat of the eddy seemed to open suddenly, and it ran straight down into darkness, and presently the funnel filled up again. It was shadowed by a huge cedar tree. If you came suddenly into the thicket above it, you were stilled with wonder. The place was different from all others on the river. It looked damp, it was so strangely green; the grass and trees showed so juicy; you fancied you could slice the fallen logs through with a penknife. Every sound there carried with a peculiar distinctness, yet the air was almost painfully still. Through the stillness there ran ever a sound, metallic, monotonous, pleasant—a clean cling-clung, cling-clung. It never varied, was the river high or low. If you lay down in the mossy grass you were lulled by that sing-song vibration, behind which you heard the low sucking breath of the eddy. The two sounds belonged to each other, and had a peculiar sympathy of tone. The birds never sang in the place, not because it was gloomy, maybe, but as though not to break in upon other rights.

There was nothing mysterious about that unceasing cling-clung, it was merely the ram of a force-pump. If you followed the pipe that led from the ram up the hill, you came to a large white house.

Many a summer day, and especially of a morning, a young girl came dancing down to the eddy, to sit beside it. She and it were very good friends; she used to tell it her secrets, and she made up a little song about it—a simple, almost foolish little song such as a clever young girl can write—Laure had been to the convent in Montreal, so she was not a common village maid.

It was very foolish. But she had such a soft, thrilling voice that you would have thought it beautiful. She was young—about sixteen—and her hair was so light that it fell about her like spray. But suddenly she ceased to be quite happy.

Armand, the avocat’s clerk, was a Protestant, and she had been meeting him at the eddy secretly. What did she care about the Catechism, or the curé, or an unblessed marriage, if Armand blessed her? She was afraid of nothing; she would dare anything while she was certain of him. But the curé discovered something—she ceased to go to confession, and, though he was a kind man, he had his duty to do.