n Fanny's competence as she boldly grasped the tiller and started out
in fine style, beating merrily to and fro across the bay. I went up
town and came back at the appointed hour of six o'clock to meet the
party. The wind was still blowing freshly and steadily, straight onto
the wharf, but they had not returned. They were beating up and down,
now skimming near to the landing, now darting away from it. We called
them to come in. I saw a look of desperation settle on Fanny's face.
She slacked away the main-sheet, put the boat before the wind, held the
tiller straight, and ran down upon the wharf with a crash that cracked
the mast and tumbled the passengers over like ten-pins in a strike. 'I
knew I could sail the old thing,' said Fanny, 'but I didn't think it
would be so hard to stop her!'"

"I see what you mean," said I. "Isn't the same difficulty often
experienced by after-dinner speakers and lecturers, and speculators on
the stock-market, and moral reformers, and academic co-ordinators of
the social system of the universe?"

"It is," he answered. "They can sail the sea of theory splendidly, but
they don't know how to make a landing. Yet that is really the thing
that everybody ought to learn. No voyage is successful unless you
deliver the goods. Even in a pleasure-voyage there must be a fit time
and place for leaving off. There is a psychological moment at which the
song has made its most thrilling impression, and there the music should
cease. There is an instant of persuasion at which the argument has had
its force, and there it should break off, just when the nail is driven
home, and before the hammer begins to bruise the wood. The art lies in
discovering this moment of cessation and using it to the best
advantage. That is the fascination of the real 'short story' as told by
Hawthorne, or Poe, or Stevenson, or Cable, or De Maupassant, or Miss
Jewett, or Margaret Deland. It reaches the point of interest and stops.
The impression is not blurred. It is like a well-cut seal: small, but
clear and sharp. You take the imprint of it distinctly. Stockton's
story of 'The Lady or the Tiger' would not gain anything by an addition
on the natural history of tigers or the psychological peculiarities of
ladies.

"That is what is meant by the saying that 'brevity is the soul of
wit,'--the thing that keeps it alive. A good joke prolonged degenerates
into teasing; and a merry jest with explanations becomes funereal. When
a man repeats