On the Lightship

On the Lightship

[Pg 9] INTRODUCTION "On Board the Light-Ship" is the titleretained in loving deference to his intentionthat would have been given to this collection of stories by their author. Had Viel lived but a little while longer, he would have justified it by placing them in a setting characteristically fantastic and characteristically original. He had planned to frame them in an encircling story describing, and duly accounting for, the chance assemblage aboard a vessel of that unusual type of a heterogeneous company; andhaving in his own fanciful way convincingly disposed of conditions not precisely in line with the strictest probabilityso to dovetail the several stories into their encirclement that the telling of them, in turn, would have come[Pg 10] easily and naturally from those upcasts of the sea. It was a project wholly after his own heart. I can imagine the pleasure that he would have found in working his machineryalways out of sight, and always running with a silent smoothnessfor getting together in that queer place his company of story-tellers. He would have used, of course, the Light-ship and the light-keepers as his firmly real ground-work. Ship and crew would have been presented in a matter-of-fact way, in keeping with their recognized matter-of-fact existence, that subtly would have instilled the habit of belief into the minds of his readers: and so would have led them onward softly, being in a way hypnotized, to an equal beliefas he slipped lightly along, with seemingly the same simplicity and the same ingenuousnessin what assuredly would not have been matter-of-fact explanations of how those story-tellers happened to be at large upon the ocean before they were taken on board! ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 40648
Author: Vielé, Herman Knickerbocker
Release Date: Sep 2, 2012
Format: eBook
Language: English