City, and to class as negative those events whose
immediate tendency is to turn him aside from the straight and narrow
path. And yet both classes of events, positive and negative, make up
really only a single series; because the negative events are conquered
one by one by the preponderant power of the positive events, and
contribute therefore indirectly, through their failure, to the
ultimate attainment of the culmination.

When a straightway arrangement of positive events along a single
strand of causation is varied and emphasized in this way by the
admission of negative events, whose tendency is to thwart the progress
of the series, the structure may be made very suggestive of that
conflict of forces which we feel to be ever present in actual life.
This structure is exhibited, for example, in Hawthorne's little tale
of "David Swan." The point of the story is that nothing happens to
David; the interest of the story lies in the events that almost happen
to him. The young man falls asleep at noon-time under the shade of a
clump of maples which cluster around a spring beside the highroad.
Three people, or sets of people, observe him in his sleep. The first
would confer upon him Wealth, the second Love, the third Death, if he
should waken at the moment. But David Swan sleeps deeply; the people
pass on; and all that almost happened to him subsides forever to the
region of the might-have-been.

=The Picaresque Pattern.=--A simple series of this sort, wherein the
events proceed, now directly, now indirectly, along a single logical
line, may be succeeded by another simple series of the same sort,
which in turn may be succeeded by a third, and so on indefinitely. In
this way is constructed the type of story known as picaresque, because
in Spain, where the type was first developed, the hero was usually a
_picaro_, or rogue. The narrative expedient in such stories is merely
to select a hero capable of adventure, to fling him loose into the
roaring and tremendous world, and to let things happen to him one
after another. The most widely known example of the type is not a
Spanish story, but a French,--the "Gil Blas" of Alain Rene Le Sage. As
soon as Gil Blas arrives at the culmination of one series of
adventures, the author starts him on another. Each series is complete
in itself and distinct from all the rest; and the structure of the
whole book may be likened, in a homely figure, to a string of
sausages. The relation between th