ef about his neck,
knowingly knotted and tucked in at the bosom; and has in
summer time a large bouquet of flowers in his buttonhole,
the present, most probably, of some enamored country lass.
His waistcoat is commonly of some bright color, striped, and
his small-clothes extend far below the knees, to meet a pair
of jockey boots which reach about half way up his legs."[12]

Use Familiar Images.

When the materials have been selected and arranged, the hardest part
of the work has been done. It now remains to express in language the
picture. A few suggestions regarding the kind of language will be
helpful. The writer must always bear in mind the fact that in
constructing a mental picture each reader does it from the images he
already possesses. "Quaint arabesques" is without meaning to many
persons; and until the word has been looked up in the dictionary, and
the picture seen there, the beautiful line of "Sir Launfal" suggests
no image whatever. So when Stevenson speaks of the birds in the
"clerestories of the wood cathedral," the image is not distinct in the
mind of a young American. Supposing a pupil in California were asked
to describe an orange to an Esquimau. He might say that it is a
spheroid about the size of an apple, and the color of one of
Lorraine's sunsets. This would be absolutely worthless to a child of
the frigid zone. Had he been told that an orange was about the size of
a snowball, much the color of the flame of a candle, that the peeling
came off like the skin from a seal, and that the inside was good to
eat, he would have known more of this fruit. The images which lie in
our minds and from which we construct new pictures are much like the
blocks that a child-builder rearranges in many different forms; but
the blocks do not change. From them he may build a castle or a mill;
yet the only difference is a difference in arrangement. So it is with
the pictures we build up in imagination: our castle in Spain we have
never seen, but the individual elements which we associate to lift up
this happy dwelling-place are the things we know and have seen. A
reader creates nothing new; all he does is to rearrange in his own
mind the images already familiar. Only so may he pass from the known
to the unknown.

The fact that we construct pictures of what we read from those images
already in our minds warns the writer against using materials which
those for whom he writes could not under