Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/81

Rh ; not perhaps the best we might find for the purpose; but at least they are to the point—the one conveying the sense of dragging, monotonous hours, the other that of tremendous speed, the conquest of time and space. On the one hand we have in The Light that Failed the unforgettable picture of Dick sitting, day after day, in his unending darkness, dumbly turning over Maisie's letters, which he is never to read; on the other, in Captains Courageous, we see Harvey Cheyne's father speeding across the breadth of the American continent, goaded by an intolerable impatience to reach the son, whom by a miracle the waves have given back to him. Now, the first case is flawless. The second, much praised and often quoted, is off the key. That private care of the elder Cheyne, "humming like a giant bee" across the mountain and prairie, by the very sense of motion it conveys, robs us of a true perception of the [67]