Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/62

 actually existing. He had attempted a jaunt into that "happy, harmless Fable-land" which is bounded by Avalon and Phæacia and Sea-coast Bohemia, and the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the west of course by the Hesperides, because he believed this country to be the one possible setting for a really satisfactory novel, even though its byways can boast of little traffic nowadays. He was completing, in fine, The Audit at Storisende—or, rather, ''Men Who Loved Alison'', as the book came afterward to be called.

Competent critics in plenty have shrugged over Kennaston's pretense therein that the romance is translated from an ancient manuscript. But to Kennaston the clerk Horvendile, the fictitious first writer of the chronicle and eye-witness of its events, was necessary. No doubt it handicapped the story's progress, so to contrive matters that one subsidiary character should invariably be at hand when important doings were in execution, and should be taken more or less into everyone's confidence—but then, somehow, it made the tale seem real.