THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE
lery I may say that I know the tone of the voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they wear. Of each man I could assert whether he would have said these words or the other words; of every woman, whether she would then have smiled or so have frowned. When I shall feel that this intimacy ceases, then I shall know that the old horse should be turned out to grass.
But if you want a model of careful construction from among the early novelists, you can do no better than turn to Hawthorne. "Hawthorne's method," says Andrew Lang, "is revealed in his published note-books. In them he jotted the germ of an idea, the first notion of a singular, perhaps supernatural situation. Many of these he never used at all; on others he would dream and dream till the persons in the situations became characters and the thing was evolved into a story. Thus he may have invented such a prob-
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