The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1902-07-13

must be naval man to realize to the
full the delicious absurdity of this lat
ter statement ~
Perhaps no living novelist is more
paintsaking or exact than Mr.. Zang-
will. Yet even he once made a han
som cab door open with a handle
from the inside, and the mistake ap-
peared in no fewer than six editions,
to be detected and quietly altered
by the author in the seventh.
Inc moon proves a terrible pitfall
to most writer's. Mrs Humphrey
Ward has publicly confessed that she
never knows when to make the moon
talnS Miss Wards assistance in all
astronomical references. Perhaps
that is the reason she has never been
trlpped up thereon.
Other writer's, however, have not
been so Fortunate. Wilkie Collins once
performed the marvellous feat of MAX
ing 1T rise in the West. Rider Hag-
lies for the effective rendering of one
of his most thrilling scenes upon an
eclipse of the new moon.
Coleridge placed a star between the
horns of the crescent moon, forgetting
that to be visible in such position the
star would have to be between the
earth and the moon, or, say, 23O, 900
miles away only.
Next to the moon, perhaps, the sun
is responsible for more glaring errors
than any other single concrete cause
At the beginning of a certain famous
NOVELETTE, title of which a few years
back was in everybody's mouth-an
Invalid characters room was said to
looking directly toward the east Yet
at the end of the book, when the inva-
lid dies, the author, wishing to make
him depart this life in flood of glory,
suffuses this eastern Widowed room
with the red glare Of the setting sum-"
Kingsley, too made one of his heroes
row out into the eastern ocean after the
setting sun. But even this glaring alb
surdity has been capped recently. In a
novel published by a we'll known firm
there occurs the following passage the
scene being. laid on board a big sailing
ship. 'How's the wind?'' asked the skip
per. '.East-northeast," replied the mate,
glancing at the masthead pennant, which
dicated." So that in the world, accord
ing to novelists we should not only find
the sun, setting in the east, but pennants
the prevailing wind.
Emile Zola is said to revise and rewrite
each s,t n, of his books many times, besides
whose prncpaP duty Il IS to ooF ateF
mistakes. Yet in 'Lourdes'' he makes
the, deaf and dumb recover their hearing
and sight instead of speech. Anthony
coming whistling up the street with
a cigar in his mouth" A lady novelist
only the other day made her hero carry
about with him, for several weeks in his
waistcoat pocket, a gold nugget which
he had discovered, said nugget being
worth, at a modest computation" $500, :
600! A nugget to be worth this amount
would be bigger than pumpkin
Medical science in fiction is seldom very
exact. but it is not often one comes across
so glaring an absurdity as that perpetrat-
ed recently by a we'll known novelist of
the realistic school, who describes a case
of scarlet fever as being no longer dam
gerous to visitor, "the original disease
| having passed into typhus.'' Probably
typhoid was what he had in his mind
but even then the statement contains at
least one glazing inaccuracy. In passing
it may be noted that brain fever a
disease which has almost got to be re-
garded as part of the >novelists stock in
trade, has no existence except in the
brains of it's creators and chroniclers
Perhaps. however, no living writer has
perpetrated more remarkable medical
blunder than the immortal Shakespeare
himself, who, in the fifth act of "Othello''
makes Desdemona come to life again
| after being smothered, and not only come
| to life, but enter into a rational and AM
mated conversation before she finally de-
! cides to die.