_Incidents_ Incident is at once the earliest and the commonest material for narration which we encounter in our own experience. An average life furnishes only a few great adventures, impressive climaxes, and epoch-making events, but every day is filled with a multiplicity of incidents, gay, pathetic, or illuminating, which actually furnish most of our material for conversation, for letters, and for memories. It has been said that the ability to write good narration is likely to be measured by the ability to recognize and relate incidents well, and it will be readily observed that most of the effectiveness of great climaxes is due to the value of the incidents which lead up to them. Essentially, an incident is an unimportant happening, usually unforeseen and not prepared for, an event which leaves behind it little or no appreciable result. Obviously every life and every day is full of such events, but the task of the writer is to recognize the elements of humor, pathos, tragedy, or human interest which serve to make certain incidents worthy to be remembered and retold. The unseeing person goes home at the end of the day without a single entertaining story to relate, while the man who worked beside him may delight the whole dinner table with half a dozen incidents which entirely failed to impress his unobservant friend. The incidents given in this section might easily have been lost had they not fallen under the observation of good story tellers, yet each of them deserved to be preserved to entertain the reader with the same touch of interest that the writer found in the experience. Each of them presents a phase of human character, and pleases the reader by humor, pathos, or some lesson in the livableness of life. The following suggestions may aid the beginner: 1. Examine your memory for experiences which stand out clearly although they neither were nor are of great importance. 2. Decide what events are associated with the most interesting people you know; often some incident has had a large part in forming your impression of these people; and sometimes incidents take on interest because of the people who figure in them. 3. Begin as late in the story as you possibly can, using little or no introductory explanation. F. del P. INCIDENTS FROM THE LIFE OF LORD FREDERICK HAMILTON