ock to-day, although it may
not have resulted necessarily from what happened an hour before, was
the logical outcome of something else that happened at noon on the
preceding Thursday, let us say, and that this in turn was the result
of causes stretching back through many months. A well-developed
narrative sense in looking on at life is very rare. Every one, of
course, is able to refer the headache of the morning after to the
hilarity if the night before; and even, after some experience, to
foresee the headache at the time of the hilarity: but life, to the
casual eye of the average man, hides in the main the secrets of its
series, and betrays only an illogical succession of events. Minds
cruder than the average see only a jumble of happenings in the life
they look upon, and group them, if at all, by propinquity in time,
rather than by any deeper law of relation. Such a mind had Dame
Quickly, the loquacious Hostess in Shakespeare's "Henry IV." Consider
the famous speech in which she accuses Falstaff of breach of promise
to marry her:--

"Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my
Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon
Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for liking
his father to a singing man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then,
as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife.
Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come
in then and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of
vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst
desire to eat some; whereby I told thee they were ill for a green
wound? And didst thou not, when she was gone down stairs, desire me to
be no more so familiarity with such poor people; saying that ere long
they should call me madam? And didst thou not kiss me and bid me fetch
thee thirty shillings? I put thee now to thy book-oath: deny it, if
thou canst."

There are, of course, many deficiencies in Dame Quickly's mental
make-up; but the one for us to notice here is her utter lack of the
narrative sense. She would never be able to tell a story: because, in
the first place, she could not select from a muddle of events those
which bore an intelligible relation to one another, and in the
second place, she could not arrange them logically instead of
chronologically. She has no sense of series. And although Dame
Quickly's mind is an exaggeration of the type it r