e of my books, and
in one only, the characters took the bit in their teeth; all at once,
they became detached from the flat paper, they turned their backs
on me and walked off bodily; and from that time my task was
stenographic--it was they who spoke, it was they who wrote the
remainder of the story."

The laws of life, and not the author's will, must finally decide the
destinies of heroes and of heroines. On the evening of February
3, 1850, just after he had written the last scene of "The Scarlet
Letter," Hawthorne read it to his wife,--"tried to read it, rather,"
he wrote the next day in a letter to his friend, Horatio Bridge, "for
my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an
ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state
then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing
it for many months." Is it not conceivable that, in the "great
diversity of emotion" which the author experienced while bringing his
story to a close, he was tempted more than once to state that Hester
and Dimmesdale escaped upon the Bristol ship and thereafter expiated
their offense in holy and serviceable lives? But if such a thought
occurred to him, he put it by, knowing that the revelation of the
scarlet letter was inexorably demanded by the highest moral law.

We are now ready to understand the statement that fiction at its best
is much more true than such careless reports of actual occurrences as
are published in the daily newspapers. Water that has been distilled
is much more really H_{2}O than the muddied natural liquid in the
bulb of the retort; and life that has been clarified in the threefold
alembic of the fiction-writer's mind is much more really life than the
clouded and unrealized events that are reported in daily chronicles of
fact. The newspaper may tell us that a man who left his office in
an apparently normal state of mind went home and shot his wife: but
people don't do such things; and though the story states an actual
occurrence, it does not tell the truth. The only way in which the
reporter could make this story true would be for him to trace out
all the antecedent causes which led inevitably to the culminating
incident. The incident itself can become true for us only when we are
made to understand it.

Mrs. Isobel Strong, the devoted step-daughter and amanuensis of Robert
Louis Stevenson, once repeated to the present writer a conversation at
Vailima in which th