at happens
in our daily lives, and then think back over all the antecedent events
we can remember, until we discern which ones among them stand in a
causal relation to the event we are considering. Next, if will be well
to look forward and imagine the sort of events which will logically
carry on the series. The great generals of history have won their most
signal victories by an exercise of the narrative sense. Holding at the
moment of planning a campaign the past and present terms of a logical
series of events, they have imagined forward and foreseen the probable
progression of the series. This may perhaps explain why the great
commanders, like Caesar and Grant, have written such able narrative
when they have turned to literature.

The young author who is trying to develop his narrative sense may find
unending exercise in the endeavor to ferret out the various series of
events which lie entangled in the confused and apparently unrelated
successions of incidents which pass before his observation. When he
sees something happen in the street, he will not be satisfied, like
the casual looker-on, merely with that solitary happening; he will try
to find out what other happenings led up to it, and again what other
happenings must logically follow from it. When he sees an interesting
person in a street-car, he will wonder where that person has come from
and whither he is going, what he has just done and what he is about
to do; he will look before and after, and pine for what is not. This
exercise is in itself interesting; and if the result of it be written
down, the young author will gain experience in expression at the same
time that he is developing his sense of narrative.

It remains for us now to consider philosophically the significance of
the word _event_. Every event has three elements: the thing that is
done, the agents that do it, and the circumstances of time and place
under which it is done; or, to say the matter in three words,--action,
actors, and setting. Only when all three elements conspire can
something happen. Life suggests to the mind of a contemplative
observer many possible events which remain unrealized because only one
or two of the necessary three elements are present,--events that are
waiting, like unborn children on the other side of Lethe, until the
necessary conditions shall call them into being. We observe a man who
could do a great thing of a certain sort if only that sort of thing
were demanded