t of the device will not be
useless. Stevenson's short story "Thrawn Janet" leads up to an encounter
with the devil, and the author loses no time in preparing a reader for
the entrance of his satanic majesty. The story begins thus:

"The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of
Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful
to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative
or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the
Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye
was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private
admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if the eye
pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many
young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the
Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon on
1st Peter, v. and 8th, 'The devil as a roaring lion,' on the Sunday
after every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to surpass
himself upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and
the terror of his bearing in the pulpit. The children were frightened
into fits, and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all
that day, full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated. The manse itself,
where it stood by the water of Dule among some thick trees, with the
Shaw overhanging it on the one side, and on the other many cold, moorish
hill-tops rising towards the sky, had begun, at a very early period of
Mr. Soulis' ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued
themselves upon their prudence; and guidmen sitting at the clachan
alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late by
that uncanny neighborhood."

Here Stevenson loses no time in keying his reader to the general pitch
of the story. It is a task that the writer of any story must undertake.
The general nature of the tale should be suggested as soon as possible,
and the story should not be allowed to falsify its introductory hints,
but should reaffirm them constantly, until all the divergent strands of
the fiction are knotted together in the climax, which will need no
interpretation. Take another instance from Stevenson, the beginning of
"Markheim," where Markheim murders the dealer in curios.

"'Yes,' said the dealer, 'our windfalls are of various kinds. Some
customers are ignorant, and then