That far I can follow him: but the play of fancy that he would have put into his explanations--as he accounted in all manner of quite probable impossible ways for such flotsam being adrift, and for its salvage aboard the Light-ship--would have been so wholly the play of his own alert individual fancy that it is beyond my ken. All that I can be sure of--and be very sure of--is that his explanations of that marine phenomenon, and of the coming of its several members up out of the sea and over the ship's rail, would have been very delightfully and very speciously satisfying. That the explanations might have been less convincing when critically analyzed is a negligible detail: the only essential requirement of a fantastic tale being that it shall be convincing as it goes along. Even my bald outline of this story--that now never will be told--shows how harmoniously in keeping it is with Vielé's literary method. He delighted in creating delicately fantastic conditions lightly bordering upon the impossible; and, having created them, in so re-solving their elements into the seemingly commonplace and the apparently probable that the fine art with which he worked his transmutations was veiled by the very perfection of its accomplishment. Such was the method that he employed in the making of what I cherish as his master-piece: "The Inn of the Silver Moon"--a story told so simply and so directly, and with such a color of engaging frankness, that each turn in its series of airily-adjusted impossible situations is accepted with an unquestioning pleasure; and that leaves upon the mind of the reader--even when released from the spell that compels belief throughout the reading of it--a lasting impression of verity. It was the method, precisely, of an exquisite form of literary art that has not flowered more perfectly, I hold with submission, since the time of the so-called Romantic School in Germany: when de la Motte Fouqué created "Undine," and Eichendorff created the "Good-for-Nothing," and all the world went at a gay quick-step to bright soft music that had been silent for nearly three hundred years. Beyond recognizing the fact that it is of the same genre, to class "The Inn of the Silver Moon" with "Undine" is to belittle it by an over-claim; but to class it with "Aus dem Leben eines Tongenichts" is to make a comparison in its favor: since Eichendorff's happy ending is a little forced and a little tawdry; while Vielé's happy ending is as inevitable as it is gracious--a result flowing smoothly from all the precedent conditions, and so deftly revealed at the crisic culminating moment that a perfecting finish is given to the delightingly perfect logic of its surprise.