Page:Under the Sun.djvu/258

234 wisdom of the prophets is nowhere more conspicuous than in their selection of this method of narration.

They made it a rule to speak before the event, instead of after it, and it is owing almost entirely to this that their utterances have been so highly spoken of.

Truth, it is said, is stranger than fiction; and so it is in a certain sense, because it is in the nature of fiction to be strange; but truth is a prosaic, every-day sort of thing, and when it is romantic it strikes the mind as being peculiarly wonderful. We do not as a rule expect facts to surprise us; so when they do, they startle us much more than any narrative ever created by novelist or poet. In that case they are more like fiction than fiction itself, and are therefore all the more charming. Thus, “The Bear in the Pig-sty” story may be considered admirable, while a pleasure is superadded by the reflection that the faith of childhood, which is at once the most solemn and the most fascinating attribute of that reverend and delightful age, has not been trifled with and betrayed. That the story was true the children have known all along, but now everybody knows it too, and acknowledges that the children were right.

At the village of Massegros, in France, only the other day, a bear-man came along the road with a bear, and asked for a night’s lodging, and the bear was put into the pig-sty. At night three men came to steal the pig; but, on the contrary, one of the men died, the second very nearly, and the third went mad with fright. The bear did it — just as it was written in the story-book years upon years ago — and the pig is back in Ins sty again.

No wonder one man went mad from fright, for the difference between pigs and bears is very considerable;