Even that most eminent disciple of the Realistic Cult,
Mr. Darrow, has been known to kill off a hero in a railroad accident
that owed its being to nothing short of his own imagination, in order
that the unhappy wight might not offend the readers of the highly
moral magazine, in which the story first appeared, by marrying a
widow whom he had been forced by Mr. Darrow to love before her
husband died. Mr. Darrow manufactured, with five strokes of his pen,
an engine and a tunnel to crush the life out of the poor fellow, whom
an immoral romancer would have allowed to live on and marry the lady,
and with perfect propriety too, since the hero and the heroine were
both of them the very models of virtue, in spite of the love which
they did not seek, and which Mr. Darrow deliberately and almost
brutally thrust into their otherwise happy lives. Of course the
railway accident was needed to give the climax to the story, which
without it might have run through six more numbers of the magazine,
to the exclusion of more exciting material; but that will not relieve
Mr.
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