would have been infinitely more reasonable of course, and much cheaper,
for me to grant it, if the applicant had made a request for my watch and
chain;[6] but the marvel is that folks should feel any attraction
towards a calling for which Nature has denied them even the raw
materials. It is true that there are some great talkers who have
manifestly nothing to say, but they don't ask their hearers to supply
them with a topic of conversation in order to be set agoing.

[6] To compare small things with great, I remember Sir Walter
Scott being thus applied to for some philanthropic object.
'Money,' said the applicant, who had some part proprietorship in a
literary miscellany, 'I don't ask for, since I know you have many
claims upon your purse; but would you write us a little paper
gratuitously for the "Keepsake"?'

'My great difficulty,' the would-be writer of fiction often says, 'is
how to begin;' whereas in fact the difficulty arises rather from his not
knowing how to end. Before undertaking the management of a train,
however short, it is absolutely necessary to know its destination.
Nothing is more common than to hear it said that an author 'does not
know where to stop;' but how much more deplorable is the position of the
passengers when there is no terminus whatsoever! They feel their
carriage 'slowing,' and put their heads expectantly out of window, but
there is no platform--no station. When they took their tickets, they
understood that they were 'booked through' to the _denouement_, and
certainly had no idea of having been brought so far merely to admire the
scenery, for which only a very few care the least about.

As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there
really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be
careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe,
well in hand. Only, in writing, there is necessarily greater art.
_There_ expansion is of course absolutely necessary; but this is not to
be done, like spreading gold leaf, by flattening out good material.
_That_ is 'padding,' a device as dangerous as it is unworthy; it is much
better to make your story a pollard--to cut it down to a mere
anecdote--than to get it lost in a forest of verbiage. No line of it,
however seemingly discursive, should be aimless, but should have some
relation to the matter in hand; and if you find the story interesting to
yourself notwithstanding th