You see, he was afraid his hogs might take cholera and so he wanted to get rid of them; and as for the saddle, he had sold his riding-horse and he didn’t have any more use for that.  Well, it isn’t a valuable clock, like a grandfather clock or anything of that sort, though it is antique.  As I was saying, when I glanced at it, it read seven minutes to six.  I remember the time very well, for just then the factory whistle blew and I remember saying to myself:  “It’s seven minutes slow today.”  You see, it’s old and we don’t keep it oiled, and so it’s always losing time.  Hardly a day passes but I set it up—­sometimes twice a day, as for the matter of that—­and I usually go by the factory whistle too, though now and then I go by Dwight’s gold watch.  Well, anyhow, that tells me what time it was.  I’m certain I can’t be wrong.

2.  Study, on the other hand, The Castaway (Appendix 5) for its judicious use of details.  Defoe in his stories is a supreme master of verisimilitude (likeness to truth).  As we read him, we cannot help believing that these things actually happened.  More than in anything else the secret of his lifelikeness lies in his constant faithfulness to reality.  He puts in the little mishaps that would have befallen a man so situated, the things he would have done, the difficulties he might have avoided had he exercised forethought.  Though Defoe had little insight into the complexities of man’s inner life, he has not been surpassed in his accumulations of naturalistic outer details.  These do not cumber his narrative; they contribute to its purpose and add to its effectiveness.  In this selection (Appendix 5) observe how plausible are such homely details as Crusoe’s seeing no sign of his comrades “except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows”; as his difficulty in getting aboard the ship again; and as his having his clothes washed away by the rising of the tide.  Find half a dozen other such incidents that You consider especially effective.

Verbal Discords

We may pitch our talk or our writing in almost any I key we choose.  Our mood may be dreamy or eager or hilarious or grim or blustering or somber or bantering or scornful or satirical or whatever we will.  But once we have established the tone, we should not—­except sometimes for broadly humorous effects—­change it needlessly or without clear forewarning.  If we do, we create a one or the other of two obstacles, or both of them, for whoever is trying to follow what we say.  In the first place, we obscure our meaning.  For example, we have; been speaking ironically and suddenly swerve into serious utterance; or we have been speaking seriously and then incongruously adopt an ironic tone.  How are our listeners, our readers to take us?  They are puzzled; they do not know.  In the second place, we offend—­perhaps in insidious, indefinable fashion—­the esthetic proprieties; we violate the natural fitness of things.  For example, we have been speaking with colloquial freedom, sprinkling our discourse with shouldn’t and won’t; suddenly we be come formal and say should not and will not.  Our meaning is as obvious as before, but the verbal harmony has been interrupted; our hearers or readers are uneasily aware of a break in the unity of tone.