gulf fixed, and no man has successfully crossed it.
Whatever conditions of life and action are assumed in one part of a
story must be continued throughout. If walruses talk and hens are
reasonable in one part of the story, to reduce them to every-day
animals would be ruinous. Consistency, that the parts stand together,
that the story seem probable,--this is more essential than facts. And
to gain this consistency the surest rule is to test the material by
its relation to the main incident.

The choice of the main incident, then, will determine to a great
degree what to exclude and what to include; it will assist in ridding
compositions of countless enumerations, aimless wanderings, and flat
endings; it will help the writer to get started, and insure a stop
when the story is told; and it will give to the story the quality most
essential for its success, consistency.

An Actor as the Storyteller.

There is yet another condition that enters into the selection of
materials: it makes a difference who tells the story. If the story be
told in the first person, that is, if one of the actors tell the
story, he cannot be supposed to know all that the other persons do
when out of sight and hearing, nor can he know what they think. To
take an illustration from a pupil's essay. A girl took her baby sister
out upon the lake in a rowboat. A violent storm arose, lashing the
lake into a fury. The oars were wrenched from her hands. Helpless on
the water, how was she to be saved? Here the essayist recited an
infinite amount of detail about the distress at home, giving the
conversation and the actions. These things she could not have known in
the character she had assumed at the beginning, that of the chief
actor. All of that should have been excluded. When Stevenson tells of
the fight in the round house, though he knew what those old salts were
doing outside, matters of great interest to the reader, he does not
let David say anything except what he could see or hear, and a very
little of what he "learned afterwards." Stevenson knew well who was
telling the story; David is too good a story-teller to tell what he
could not know. In the pupil's essay and in "Kidnapped," all such
matters would have a direct bearing on the main incident; they could
be included without destroying the unity of the story. But they cannot
be included when the story is told by one of the actors.

The Omniscience of an Author.

Many stories, probably most s