So, too, his treatment of the comedy in human character and existence. Human destiny and fate are too dear and pathetic to him to allow him to engage his art in any raucous laughter. The smiles he evokes are based on sympathetic fellow-feeling, on tenderness. We are amused, yet not unsympathetic, at the rage of Madame Laroque, defeated in a long-cherished love, and hope of ultimate marriage, by the elopement of her ward, Cesarine, with the postmaster (_The Wooing of Monsieur Cuerrier_); the futilities of old Paul Farlotte, who would see ‘la belle France’ before he dies, envisage a comic character, but subdue our laughter with the pathos of frustrated desire. These themes, we see, are chosen from character and life in a typical French-Canadian village, yet the sentiments, the ideals of human love and character and conduct, and the natural and spiritual color, are Canadian and even universal. They depend not upon mere accidents of circumstance, but upon lasting and universal human emotions and human relationships—permanent literary values. In these stories, Dr. Scott achieves structural unity and harmony of emotional tone with an entire absence of any striving for effect—with that finished art that conceals the artifice of the craftsman. Always a careful workman rather than a prolific writer, it was not until 1923 that Duncan Campbell Scott published another volume of short stories, _The Witching of Elspie_. Some of these are French-Canadian in their setting, but those most exquisitely wrought deal with the lonely and heart-searching life of the Hudson Bay posts. Although Scott’s method was fully formed in his first volume, there is here a very evident advance in artistry, a greater economy in expression, but a deeper intensity of effect. Here he shows a remarkable skill in the almost imperceptible transition from explanation or description to the inside of the mind of the varying personages of the story and back again to description or explanation—one of the most artistic touches of the work of a finished craftsman. Charles G. D. Roberts developed, in the story of animal psychology, a species of Canadian short story that depends not so much upon emotional and artistic effects and a unity of impressionistic tone as upon intellectual and stylistic effects and novelty of theme. Scott worked with an artistry so exquisite that his stories possess the simplicity and directness which conceal art. Roberts wrought his animal and romantic short stories with an artistry so much in the manner of the prose-poet that they reveal the stylist consciously aiming to impress the intellect with niceties of structure, and the sensibility with word-painting, always _couleur de rose_. When Roberts is the psychologist he is also most the true structural stylist. But for an example of more impressionistic color, of sheer word-painting, of prose-poetry _couleur de rose_, the following paragraphs from _The Watchers in the Swamp_ are convincing:—