stories as they struck him. His successive entries are like the
souls of stories awaiting embodiment, which many of them never received;
they bring us very near to the workings of the mind of a great master.
Here are some of them:

'A sketch to be given of a modern reformer, a type of the extreme
doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and the like. He goes
about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the point of
making many converts, when his labours are suddenly interrupted by the
appearance of the keeper of a madhouse whence he has escaped. Much
may be made of this idea.'

'The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a
street lantern; the time when the lamp is near going out; and the
catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam.'

'A person to be writing a tale and to find it shapes itself against
his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought, and
a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might
shadow forth his own fate--he having made himself one of the
personages.'

'Two persons to be expecting some occurrence and watching for the two
principal actors in it, and to find that the occurrence is even then
passing, and that they themselves are the two actors.'

'A satire on ambition and fame from a statue of snow.'

Hawthorne used this idea in one of his sketches.

'A moral philosopher to buy a slave, or otherwise get possession of a
human being, and to use him for the sake of experiment by trying the
operation of a certain vice on him.'

M. Bourget, the French romancer, has made use of this idea in his novel
called _Le Disciple_. Only it is not a slave, but a young girl whom he
pretends to love, that is the subject of the moral philosopher's
experiment; and a noisy war has been waged round the book in France.
Hawthorne would plainly have seized the romantic essence of the idea and
would have avoided the boneyard of 'problem morality.'

'A story the principal personage of which shall seem always on the
point of entering on the scene, but shall never appear.'

This is the device that gives fascination to the figures of Richelieu in
_Marion Delorme_, and of Captain Flint in _Treasure Island_.

'The majesty of death to be exemplified in a beggar, who, after being
seen humble and cringing in the streets of a city for many years, at
length by