ch, at the
outset, was largely lacking in her mind. To many readers who are not
without appreciation of the importance and profundity of her
understanding of human nature, her stories are wearisome and
unalluring, because she told them with labor, not with ease. She does
not seem to have had a good time with them, as Stevenson had with
"Treasure Island," a story in other ways of comparative unimportance.
And surely it is not frivolous to state that the most profound and
serious of thoughts are communicated best when they are communicated
with the greatest interest.

=Developing the Sense of Narrative.=--It could hardly be hoped that a
person entirely devoid of the narrative sense should acquire it by any
amount of labor; but nearly every one possesses it in at least a
rudimentary degree, and any one possessing it at all may develop it by
exercise. A simple and common-sensible exercise is to seize hold of
some event that happens in our daily lives, and then think back over
all the antecedent events we can remember, until we discern which ones
among them stand in a causal relation to the event we are considering.
Next, it will be well to look forward and imagine the sort of events
which will logically carry on the series. The great generals of
history have won their most signal victories by an exercise of the
narrative sense. Holding at the moment of planning a campaign the past
and present terms of a logical series of events, they have imagined
forward and foreseen the probable progression of the series. This may
perhaps explain why the great commanders, like Caesar and Grant, have
written such able narrative when they have turned to literature.

The young author who is trying to develop his narrative sense may find
unending exercise in the endeavor to ferret out the various series of
events which lie entangled in the confused and apparently unrelated
successions of incidents which pass before his observation. When he
sees something happen in the street, he will not be satisfied, like
the casual looker-on, merely with that solitary happening; he will try
to find out what other happenings led up to it, and again what other
happenings must logically follow from it. When he sees an interesting
person in a street-car, he will wonder where that person has come from
and whither he is going, what he has just done and what he is about to
do; he will look before and after, and pine for what is not. This
exercise is in itself in