including the essential features of the
house. Further statements about the roof, the windows, the doors, the
porch, the yard, and the fence, would each add something to the picture
until it was complete. The impression with which the reader started would
be added to, but not otherwise changed. But if we should conclude the
description with the statement, "This house was distinguished from its
neighbors by the fact that it was not of the usual rectangular form, but
was octagonal in shape," the reader would find that the image which he
had formed would need to be entirely changed. It is evident that if the
word _octagonal_ is to appear at all, it must be at the beginning. Care
must be taken to place all the words that affect the fundamental image in
the sentence that gives the general characteristics of that which we are
describing.

Hawthorne begins _The House of the Seven Gables_ as follows:--

Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty
wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various
points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The
street is Pyncheon street; the house is the old Pyncheon house; and an elm
tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every
town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon elm. On my occasional visits
to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down Pyncheon street, for
the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities,--the
great elm tree and the weather-beaten edifice.

Later he gives a detailed description of the house on the morning of its
completion as follows:--

Maule's lane, or Pyncheon street, as it were now more decorous to call it,
was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation on its way to
church. All, as they approached, looked upward at the imposing edifice,
which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations of mankind.
There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the street, but in
pride, not modesty. Its whole visible exterior was ornamented with quaint
figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a Gothic fancy, and drawn or
stamped in the glittering plaster, composed of lime, pebbles, and bits of
glass, with which the woodwork of the walls was overspread. On every side
the seven gables pointed sharply towards the sky, and presented the aspect
of a whole sisterhood of edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one
great chi