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Chapter II
Souls on Sunday

I must have been thirteen or fourteen years of age--it may have been
indeed in this very year '97--when I first read Stevenson's story of
_Treasure Island_. It is the fashion, I believe, now with the Clever
Solemn Ones to despise Stevenson as a writer of romantic Tushery,
All the same, if it's realism they want I'm still waiting to see something
more realistic than Pew or Long John Silver. Realism may depend as truly
on a blind man's tap with his stick upon the ground as on any number of
adulteries.
In those young years, thank God, I knew nothing about realism and read the
tale for what it was worth. And it was worth three hundred bags of gold.
Now, on looking back, it seems to me that the spirit that overtook our
town just at this time was very like the spirit that seized upon Dr.
Livesey, young Hawkins and the rest when they discovered the dead
Buccaneer's map. This is no forced parallel. It was with a real sense of
adventure that the Whispering began about the Brandons and Ronder and the
Pybus St. Anthony living and the rest of it.


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