"The Last of the Knickerbockers" has this same humour and this same happiness of phrasing; and in its serious midst is set the fantastic episode of "The Yellow Sleigh"--that needs only to be amplified to become another "Inn of the Silver Moon." But there its resemblance to Vielé's other stories ends. Least of all has "The Inn of the Silver Moon" anything in common with it. That delectable thistle-down romance goes trippingly over sunbeams in a straightaway course that has no intricacies: with all the interest constantly focussed upon a heroine and a hero to whom all the other characters are minor and accessory; and with never a break in the light-hearted note that is struck at the start. "The Last of the Knickerbockers," a blend of comedy and semi-tragedy, is far away from all this--both in spirit and in form. It is the most largely and the most seriously conceived of Vielé's works: not a romance, but a novel with a substantial plot carefully developed in intricate action; and while the main interest is centred--as properly it should be--upon a wholly charming heroine and a wholly satisfying hero, these pleasing young people are made to know, and to keep, their place in a crowd of strong characters strongly drawn. It is a good story to read simply as a story; but it is more than that, it is a document: an ambered preservation of a phase of New York society that already almost has vanished, and that soon will have vanished absolutely--when the last Mrs. and Mr. Bella Ruggles shall have closed to decayed aristocracy the last shabbily pretentious boarding house in the last dingy Kenilworth Place; and when decayed aristocracy, so evicted, shall be forced to dwell in apartment-houses of the bell-and-speaking-tube type, and to dine (as _Alida_ prophetically put it) "at Italian tables-d'hôte--like the Café Chianti, in grandfather's old house, where they have music and charge only fifty cents, including wine"! So true a presentment as this story is of New York's old-time strait faiths and straiter social customs will outlive long, I am confident, the great mass of the fiction of Vielé's day. It will be actively alive while even a faint memory of those faiths and customs is cherished by living people; and when all of such ancients shall have retired (with the final befitting dignity attendant upon a special license) to their family homes beneath the shadows of St. Mark's and Trinity, carrying their memories with them, it will become, as I have said, a document: preserving the traditions which otherwise would have been buried with them; and so linking permanently--as they linked temporarily--New York's ever-increasingly ardent present with its ever-paling less strenuous past.