acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the 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."

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.

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 either (as in the
forego