GENERAL. The first sentence in “Fog” serves two purposes. 1. It
thrusts satirically at the commercializing of the short story. 2. It
induces the reader to believe the inner narrative is a growth, not
a construction. The author seems to have hesitated between leaving
the supernatural story as one beautiful enough to stand alone, and
building about it the humorous and even cynical external action. Or it
may be that he saw best to set off the fragile inner narrative with
the hard facts of a workaday world. Without the prelude to the story
(which begins with “He was born a thousand miles from deep water”) and
without the sentences after the asterisks on page 73, the narrative
recalls “The Brushwood Boy.” And this is true, despite the rather
homely dialect. If, however, the reader is duly influenced by the parts
referred to, he cannot but recall Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “Struggle for
Life,” as a prototype.