Oldbuck, who dined
there at the beginning of the _Antiquary_. But you need not tell
me--that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet
complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully. So it
is with names and faces; so it is with incidents that are idle and
inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some
quaint romance, which the all-careless author leaves untold. How many
of these romances have we not seen determine at their birth; how many
people have met us with a look of meaning in their eye, and sunk at
once into trivial acquaintances; to how many places have we not drawn
near, with express intimations--"here my destiny awaits me"--and we
have but dined there and passed on! I have lived both at the Hawes and
Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some
adventure that should justify the place; but though the feeling had me
to bed at night and called me again at morning in one unbroken round
of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark.
The man or the hour had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat
shall put off from the Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and
some frosty night a horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip
upon the green shutters of the inn at Burford.[12]

Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively
literature has to count. The desire for knowledge, I had almost added
the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for
fit and striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to
tell, himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in
his play; and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the
game, at once enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the
great creative writer shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of
the day-dreams of common men. His stories may be nourished with the
realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the nameless
longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the day-dream.
The right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place;
the right kind of thing should follow; and not only the characters
talk aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in a tale
answer one to another like notes in music. The threads of a story come
from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the
characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or
to n