The story is amusing enough to bear repetition, and bereft of corroborative detail, evidently designed to lend artistic verisimilitude to the narrative, it is as follows: The boat was detained at a landing at a small Kentucky town where the laws against gambling were supposed to be very strict.

[No solid foundation for this tradition is known, though there is a certain circumstantial verisimilitude about it.

The great charm, however, of the Orlando Furioso is not in its knight-errantry, or its main plot, or the cunning interweavement of its minor ones, but in its endless variety, truth, force, and animal spirits; in its fidelity to actual nature while it keeps within the bounds of the probable, and its no less enchanting verisimilitude during its wildest sallies of imagination.

But in the particular, one is astonished and saddened at the cruelties in which the poet allows his imagination to riot horrors generally described with too intense a verisimilitude not to excite our admiration, with too astounding a perseverance not to amaze our humanity, and sometimes with an amount of positive joy and delight that makes us ready to shut the book with disgust and indignation.