Is he Popenjoy? [antikvár]

Chapter I introductory-number one I WOULD that it were possible so to teli a story that a reader should beforehand know every detail of it up to a certain point, or be so circumstanced that he might be supposed to know. In teliing the little novelettes of our life, we commence our narrations with the presumption that these details are borne in mind, and though they be all forgottén, the stories come out intelligible at last. 'You remember Mary Walker. Oh yes, you do;- that pretty girl, but such a queer temper! And how she was engaged to marry Harry Jones, and said she wouldn't at the church-door, till her father threatened her with bread and water; and how they have been living ever since as happy as two turtle-doves down in Devonshire, till that scoundrel, Lieutenant Smith, went to Bideford! Smith has been found dead at the bottom of a saw-pit. Nobody's sorry for him. She's in a madhouse at Exeter; and Jones has disappeared, and couldn't have had more than thirty shillings in his pocket.' This is quite as much as anybody ought to want to know previous to the unravelling of the tragedy of the Jones's. But such stories as those I have to teli cannot be written after that fashion. We novelists are constantly twitted with being long; and to the gentlemen who condescend to review us, and who take up our volumes with a view to business rather than pleasure, we must be infinite in length and tedium. But the story must be made intelligible from the beginning, or the real növel readers will not like it. The plan of jumping at once into the middle has been often tried, and sometimes seductively enough for a chapter or two; but the writer still has to hark back, and to begin