In his new novel, ‘The Wrecker,’ Mr. Stevenson speaks of the pleasure which children take in breaking their toys. They want ‘to see how it is done,’ they explore the sawdust with which the doll is stuffed, and the sand which makes the toy cobbler work, and they unscrew the wheels of their watches. This is the scientific instinct in an early form. Later, the same kind of curiosity inspires men to pry into the circulation of the blood and the mechanism of the brain. These organs and fluids work on, whether we know how it is done or not. In another guise, this painfully inquiring spirit urges people to ask how novels are ‘done,’ and Mr. Stevenson very goodnaturedly, rather than very wisely, tells them in his ‘epilude,’ as a Scotch poet amusingly called it. ‘If ‘prelude,’ why not ‘epilude’?’ he asked himself. The reason was not obvious to him. Nor is the reason for Mr. Stevenson's explanation very obvious. He and Mr. Lloyd Osbourne thought of a wreck peopled by the wrong crew – that was the primitive cell or germ of the narrative. Then they worked in descriptions of life and manners drawn from experiences in the Forest of Fontainebleau, in Edinburgh, in the isles of the Pacific, in San Francisco, in Australia. Well, to be told all this may please the curious, but I confess to feeling uncomfortable and ‘disilluded’ when I am thus taken behind the scenes. The author breaks up his own toy, and shows us the strings and the sand. It is an excellent toy, though I keep wishing that so much of the sand had not been shed on board of the Flying Scud, or rather that it had not been shed in that particular way. ‘Mine is a beastly story,’ says Mr. Carthew, and ‘beastly’ it is. The murder of unresisting men, merely because their evidence would be inconvenient, is a crime for which one has no sympathy and can even make no excuse. A novelist might have arranged for a fair fight, as he was inevitably compelled to kill people.