e of absolute finality.
Hawthorne was far less firm in mastering the endings of his stories.
His personal predilection for pointing a moral to adorn his tale led
him frequently to append a passage of homiletic comment which was not
bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the narrative itself. In
the chapter on emphasis, we have already called attention to Guy
de Maupassant's device of periodic structure, by means of which the
solution of the story is withheld till the concluding sentences. This
exceedingly effective expedient, however, is applicable only in the
sort of story wherein the element of surprise is inherent in the
nature of the theme. In no other single feature of construction may
the work of the inexperienced author be so readily detected as in
the final passage of his story. Mr. Kipling's "Lispeth" (the first of
"Plain Tales from the Hills"), which was written at a very early age,
began perfectly [the first word is "She"] and proceeded well; but when
he approached his conclusion, the young author did not know where to
stop. His story really ended at the words, "And she never came
back"; for at that point his pre-established design had been entirely
effected. But instead of closing there, he appended four unnecessary
paragraphs, dealing with the subsequent life of his heroine,--all of
which was, to use his own familiar phrase, "another story." Poe and
de Maupassant would not have made this mistake; and neither would Mr.
Kipling after he had grown into mastery of artistic method.

In his very interesting paper on "The Philosophy of Composition,"
Edgar Allan Poe outlined step by step the intellectual processes
by which he developed the structure of "The Raven," and fashioned
a finished poem from a preconceived effect. It is greatly to be
regretted that he did not write a similar essay outlining in detail
the successive stages in the structure of one of his short-stories.
With his extraordinarily clear and analytic intellect, he fashioned
his plots with mathematical precision. So rigorously did he work that
in his best stories we feel that the removal of a sentence would be an
amputation. He succeeded absolutely in giving his narrative the utmost
emphasis with the greatest economy of means.

If we learn through and through how a single perfect story is
constructed, we shall have gone far toward understanding the technic
of story-building as a whole. Let us therefore analyze one of Poe's
short-stories,--fol