management of a train, however short, it is absolutely necessary to know its destination.  Nothing is more common than to hear it said that an author ’does not know where to stop;’ but how much more deplorable is the position of the passengers when there is no terminus whatsoever!  They feel their carriage ‘slowing,’ and put their heads expectantly out of window, but there is no platform—­no station.  When they took their tickets, they understood that they were ‘booked through’ to the denouement, and certainly had no idea of having been brought so far merely to admire the scenery, for which only a very few care the least about.

As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand.  Only, in writing, there is necessarily greater art. There expansion is of course absolutely necessary; but this is not to be done, like spreading gold leaf, by flattening out good material. That is ‘padding,’ a device as dangerous as it is unworthy; it is much better to make your story a pollard—­to cut it down to a mere anecdote—­than to get it lost in a forest of verbiage.  No line of it, however seemingly discursive, should be aimless, but should have some relation to the matter in hand; and if you find the story interesting to yourself notwithstanding that you know the end of it, it will certainly interest the reader.

The manner in which a good story grows under the hand is so remarkable, that no tropic vegetation can show the like of it.  For, consider, when you have got your germ—­the mere idea, not half a dozen lines perhaps—­which is to form your plot, how small a thing it is compared with, say, the thousand pages which it has to occupy in the three-volume novel!  Yet to the story-teller the germ is everything.  When I was a very young man—­a quarter of a century ago, alas!—­and had very little experience in these matters, I was reading on a coachbox (for I read everywhere in those days) an account of some gigantic trees; one of them was described as sound outside, but within, for many feet, a mass of rottenness and decay.  If a boy should climb up birdsnesting into the fork of it, thought I, he might go down feet first and hands overhead, and never be heard of again.  How inexplicable too, as well as melancholy, such a disappearance would be!  Then, ’as when a great thought strikes along the brain and flushes all the cheek,’ it struck me what an appropriate end it would be—­with fear (lest he should turn up again) instead of hope for the fulcrum to move the reader—­for a bad character of a novel.  Before I had left the coachbox I had thought out ‘Lost Sir Massingberd.’