conclusion to Stevenson's story of "Markheim." The hero, having slain
a dealer in his shop on Christmas day, spends a long time alone,
ransacking the dealer's effects and listening to the voice of
conscience. He is interrupted by a ringing of the door-bell. The
dealer's maid has returned from holidaying.--

"He opened the door and went downstairs very slowly, thinking to
himself. His past went soberly before him; he beheld it as it was,
ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as a chance-medley--a scene
of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed it, tempted him no longer; but on
the further side he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He paused in
the passage, and looked into the shop, where the candle still burned
by the dead body. It was strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealer
swarmed into his mind as he stood gazing. And then the bell once more
broke out into impatient clamor.

"He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a
smile.

"'You had better go for the police,' said he: 'I have killed your
master.'"

The last sentence of this passage is an effect which is logically
led up to by many causes that are rapidly reviewed in the preceding
sentences. Stevenson has here patterned a passage of life along lines
of causation; he has employed the logical method of narration: but
Pepys, in the selection quoted, looked upon events with no narrative
sense whatever.

The narrative sense is, primarily, an ability to trace an event back
to its logical causes and to look forward to its logical effects.
It is the sense through which we realize, for instance, that what
happened at two o'clock 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 of 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, rathe