middle of the day: grandmother had never been so large or so beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and both flew in brightness and joy above the earth, very, very high; and up there was neither cold, nor hunger, nor care God!

they were with

But in the corner, leaning against the wall, sat the poor girl with red cheeks and smiling mouth, frozen to death on the last evening of the Old Year. The New Year's sun rose upon a little corpse! The child sat there, stiff and cold, with the matches of which one bundle was burned. "She wanted to warm herself," the people said. No one imagined what a beautiful thing she had seen, and in what glory she had gone in with her grandmother to the New Year's Day.

The causal connection of the events here is obvious. From the beginning, the culmination — the death of the little girl by freezing is foreseen, and everything in the tale leads up to it. This inevitableness of the conclusion is the mark of a good plot. Everything in the narrative should point unmistakably to the conclusion, and one should feel when one reaches it that it is the inevitable result of the coöperation or conflict of all the forces that have taken part in the action.

77. Characterization. In the center of every

event or incident that becomes material for the narrator is an actor or character. It is not necessary that this character should always be a human being. It may be a beast, an unseen force of nature, or even an inanimate stock or stone, provided that, for the occasion, it is regarded as a being having life and intelligence. A story without a character of some kind is an impossibility.

As a rule, we are apt to be most interested in stories where the characters are human beings much like ourselves; and the more nearly like ourselves these characters are the more likely are we to be interested in them and their doings. Hence it is part of the business of every good story-teller to make his characters as lifelike as possible. 'Not that he should subordinate his story to the delineation of character, as is sometimes done in certain types of modern fiction. Far from it. The story that is to say, the complication or interweaving of the events with which he is. concerned should always be first in his mind, and characterization second. As Stevenson remarks, though with perhaps just a touch of exaggeration, "It is not character but incident that wooes us out of our reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves; some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realized in the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance.'

The ways in which a narrator may delineate character are various. Following more or less closely the descriptive method, he may portray his characters directly by telling us what they are like, or indirectly by telling us what they have said and done; or again, adopting the dramatic method, he may

A Gossip on Romance.

make them reveal, through their own words and actions, their individuality themselves, as persons do in real life. The last way is perhaps the best, since it is the most natural; but it is seldom used alone. Ordinarily, a writer will give us a hint as to what his characters are like, then place them before us acting and talking, and thus allow us to judge of them for ourselves.

Observe how Stevenson, in the following passage, for example, first gives us a general notion of Dr. Desprez, and then follows it up with a conversation between the Doctor and the waif, Jean-Marie, — a conversation admirable for the revelation it gives us of both characters:

Dr. Desprez always rose early. Before the smoke arose, before the first cart rattled over the bridge to the day's labor in the fields, he was to be found wandering in his garden. Now he would pick a bunch of grapes; now he would eat a big pear under the trellis; now he would draw all sorts of fancies on the path with the end of his cane; now he would go down and watch the river running endlessly past the timber landingplace at which he moored his boat. There was no time, he used to say, for making theories like the early morning. "I rise earlier than any one else in the village," he once boasted. "It is a fair consequence that I know more and wish to do less with my knowledge."

The morning after he had been summoned to the dying mountebank, the Doctor visited the wharf at the tail of his garden, and had a long look at the running water. This he called prayer; but whether his adorations were addressed to the goddess Hygeia or some more orthodox deity, never

plainly appeared. For he had uttered doubtful oracles, sometimes declaring that a river was the type of bodily health, sometimes extolling it as the great moral preacher, continually preaching peace, continuity, and diligence to man's tormented spirits. After he had watched a mile or so of the clear water running by before his eyes, seen a fish or two come to the surface with a gleam of silver, and sufficiently admired the long shadows of the trees falling half across the river from the opposite bank, with patches of moving sunlight in between, he strolled once more up the garden and through his house into the street, feeling cool and renovated.

On one of the posts before Tentaillon's carriage entry he espied a little dark figure perched in a meditative attitude, and immediately recognized Jean-Marie.

"Aha!" he said, stopping before him humorously, with a hand on either knee. "So we rise early in the morning, do we? It appears to me that we have all the vices of a philosopher."

The boy got to his feet and made a grave salutation. "And how is our patient?" asked Desprez.

It appeared the patient was about the same.

"And why do you rise early in the morning?" he pursued. Jean-Marie, after a long silence, professed that he hardly

knew.

"You hardly know?" repeated Desprez. "We hardly know anything, my man, until we try to learn. Interrogate your consciousness. Come, push me this inquiry home. Do you like it?"

"Yes," said the boy slowly; "yes, I like it."

"And why do you like it?" continued the Doctor. (We are now pursuing the Socratic method.) Why do you like it ?"

"It is quiet," answered Jean-Marie; “ and I have nothing to do; and then I feel as if I were good."

Dr. Desprez took a seat at the opposite side. He was beginning to take an interest in the talk, for the boy plainly thought before he spoke, and tried to answer truly. "It appears you have a taste for feeling good," said the Doctor. "Now, there you puzzle me extremely; for I thought you said you were a thief; and the two are incompatible."

"Is it very bad to steal?" asked Jean-Marie. "Such is the general opinion, little boy," replied the Doctor. "No; but I mean as I stole," exclaimed the other.

"For I had no choice. I think it is surely right to have bread; it must be right to have bread, there comes so plain a want of it. And then they beat me cruelly if I returned with nothing," he added. "I was not ignorant of right and wrong; for before that I had been well taught by a priest, who was very kind to me." (The Doctor made a horrible grimace at the word "priest.") "But it seemed to me, when one had nothing to eat and was beaten, it was a different affair. would not have stolen for tartlets, I believe; but any one would steal for baker's bread."

"And so I suppose, "you prayed God to forgive you, and explained the case to him at length."

"said the Doctor, with a rising sneer,

"Why, sir?" asked Jean-Marie. "I do not see."

"Your priest would see, however," retorted Desprez. "Would he?" asked the boy, troubled for the first time. "I should have thought God would have known." "Eh?" snarled the Doctor.

"I should have thought God would have understood me," replied the other. "You do not, I see; but then it was God that made me think so, was it not?"

"Little boy, little boy," said Dr. Desprez, "I told you already you had the vices of philosophy; if you display the virtues also, I must go. I am a student of the blessed laws of health, an observer of plain and temperate nature in her common walks; and I cannot preserve my equanimity in presence of a monster. Do you understand?"