earth. I
heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe
how healthily--how calmly I can tell you the whole story."

=3. Emphasis by Pause.=--In general it may be said that any pause in a
narrative emphasizes by position whatever immediately precedes it, and
also (though to a considerably less extent) whatever immediately
follows it. For this reason many masters of the short-story, like
Daudet and de Maupassant, construct their narratives in sections, in
order to multiply the number of terminal and initial positions.
Asterisks strung across the page not only make the reader aware of the
completion of an integral portion of the story, but also focus his
attention emphatically on the last thing that has been said before the
interruption. The employment of _points de suspension_--a mark of
punctuation consisting of a series of successive dots ...--which is so
frequent with French authors, is a device which is used to interrupt a
sentence solely for the sake of emphasis by pause.

=Further Discussion of Emphasis by Position.=--The instances which we
have selected to illustrate the expedient of emphasizing by position
have been chosen for convenience from short-stories; but the same
principle may be applied with similar success in constructing the
chapters of a novel. Certain great but inartistic novelists, like Sir
Walter Scott, show themselves to be singularly obtuse to the advantage
of placing emphatic material in an emphatic position. Scott is almost
always careless of his chapter endings: he allows the sections of his
narrative to drift and straggle, instead of rounding them to an
emphatic close. But more artistic novelists, like Victor Hugo for
example, never fail to take advantage of the terminal position.
Consider the close of Book XI, Chapter II, of "Notre Dame de Paris."
The gypsy-girl, Esmeralda, has been hanged in the Place de Greve. The
hunchback, Quasimodo, has flung the archdeacon, Claude Frollo, from
the tower-top of Notre Dame. This paragraph then brings the chapter to
an end:--

"Quasimodo then raised his eye to the gypsy, whose body he saw,
depending from the gibbet, shudder afar under her white robe with the
last tremblings of death-agony; then he lowered it to the archdeacon,
stretched out at the foot of the tower and no longer having human
form; and he said with a sob that made his deep chest heave: 'Oh! all
that I have loved!'"

A chapter ending may be artistically planned eit