Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/32

 MARK TWAIN

strong enough to block the next one. Before the month and year were out no date given, let us call it Christmas Shelley and family were nested in a furnished house in Windsor, &quot;at no great distance from the Boinvilles&quot; these decoys still residing at Bracknell.

What we need, now, is a misleading conjecture. We get it with characteristic promptness and de pravity :

But Prince Athanase found not the aged Zonoras, the friend of his boyhood, in any wanderings to Windsor. Dr. Lind had died a year since, and with his death Windsor must have lost, for Shelley, its chief attraction.

Still, not to mention Shelley s wife, there was Bracknell, at any rate. While Bracknell remains, all solace is not lost. Shelley is represented by this biographer as doing a great many careless things, but to my mind this hiring a furnished house for three months in order to be with a man who has been dead a year, is the carelessest of them all. One feels for him that is but natural, and does us honor besides yet one is vexed, for all that. He could have written and asked about the aged Zonoras before taking the house. He may not have had the address, but that is nothing any postman would know the aged Zonoras; a dead postman would re member a name like that.

And yet, why throw a rag like this to us ravening wolves? Is it seriously supposable that we will stop to chew it and let our prey escape? No, we are getting to expect this kind of device, and to give it merely a sniff for certainty s sake and then walk

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