Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/23

A Puritan Bohemia with nodding curls and men with hair like white spun silk go tremulously by, wondering at the queer life of this secluded spot.

The place is as quiet as a motionless pool at the side of a moving stream. Hence the tales of Bohemia are not full of strange incident. The hero of romance does not dwell here, and the villain is unknown. There are few men in this new country. Man here is a memory, a shadow, rarely a reality.

And the stories are incoherent. Only moments of life are represented. Here are but the beginnings and the endings of stories, often the ending that comes after the climax, sometimes the climax itself. Residence in Bohemia is perhaps only as long as the working out of a mood. Therefore its romances are not orderly developments of plot and counterplot, but merely bits of vivid experience in busy people's lives.