It was almost
twice too long.

After this came a period of steady desk work, every morning, of
re-writing, compression, more compression, and the more or less
mechanical work of technical revision, what a member of my family calls
"cutting out the 'whiches'". The first thing to do each morning was to
read a part of it over aloud, sentence by sentence, to try to catch
clumsy, ungraceful phrases, overweights at one end or the other,
"ringing" them as you ring a dubious coin, clipping off too-trailing
relative clauses, "listening" hard. This work depends on what is known
in music as "ear", and in my case it cannot be kept up long at a time,
because I find my attention flagging. When I begin to suspect that my
ear is dulling, I turn to other varieties of revision, of which there
are plenty to keep anybody busy; for instance revision to explain facts;
in this category is the sentence just after the narrator suspects
Ev'leen Ann has gone down to the brook, "my ears ringing with all the
frightening tales of the morbid vein of violence which runs through the
characters of our reticent people." It seemed too on re-reading the
story for the tenth or eleventh time, that for readers who do not know
our valley people, the girl's attempt at suicide might seem improbable.
Some reference ought to be brought in, giving the facts that their
sorrow and despair is terrible in proportion to the nervous strain of
their tradition of repression, and that suicide is by no means unknown.
I tried bringing that fact in, as part of the conversation with Cousin
Horace, but it never fused with the rest there, "stayed on top of the
page" as bad sentences will do, never sank in, and always made the
disagreeable impression on me that a false intonation in an actor's
voice does. So it came out from there. I tried putting it in Ev'leen
Ann's mouth, in a carefully arranged form, but it was so shockingly out
of character there, that it was snatched out at once. There I hung over
the manuscript with that necessary fact in my hand and no place to lay
it down. Finally I perceived a possible opening for it, where it now is
in the story, and squeezing it in there discontentedly left it, for I
still think it only inoffensively and not well placed.

Then there is the traditional, obvious revision for suggestiveness, such
as the recurrent mention of the mountain brook at the beginning of each
of the first scenes; revision for ordinary sense, in the first draught I