He began a merry little song to the effect that his sweetheart was a wine-bottle, and master and man, leaving care behind, returned to the picturesque Rue Royale.  The ways of Providence are indeed strange.  In all Parson Jones’s after-life, amid the many painful reminiscences of his visit to the City of the Plain, the sweet knowledge was withheld from him that by the light of the Christian virtue that shone from him even in his great fall, Jules St.-Ange arose, and went to his father an honest man.

OUR AROMATIC UNCLE

BY

HENRY CUYLER BUNNER

The title of Mr. Bunner’s story is attractive and stimulating to the imagination.  The plot is slight, yet clever in its use of the surprise element.  Its leading character is a splendid illustration of a hero worshipper who is himself the real hero.  The atmosphere is especially good.  It is warmed by family affection and fragrant with romance.  This romance, as Mr. Grabo points out in “The Art of the Short Story,” is suggested rather than recorded.  The running away of the Judge’s son and of his little admirer, the butcher boy, really lies outside the story proper.  “With these youthful adventures the story has not directly to do, but the hints of the antecedent action envelop the story with a romantic atmosphere.  The reader speculates upon the story suggested, and thereby is the written story enriched and made a part of a larger whole.”

OUR AROMATIC UNCLE

[Footnote:  From “Love in Old Cloathes and Other Stories,” by F. C. Bunner.  Copyright, 1896, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]

It is always with a feeling of personal tenderness and regret that I recall his story, although it began long before I was born, and must have ended shortly after that important date, and although I myself never laid eyes on the personage of whom my wife and I always speak as “The Aromatic Uncle.”

The story begins so long ago, indeed, that I can tell it only as a tradition of my wife’s family.  It goes back to the days when Boston was so frankly provincial a town that one of its leading citizens, a man of eminent position and ancient family, remarked to a young kinsman whom he was entertaining at his hospitable board, by way of pleasing and profitable discourse:  “Nephew, it may interest you to know that it is Mr. Everett who has the other hindquarter of this lamb”.  This simple tale I will vouch for, for I got it from the lips of the nephew, who has been my uncle for so many years that I know him to be a trustworthy authority.