The first book of _The Forerunner_ is a key to this whole method of abstracting episodes from history and setting them into a novel; especially as it is one of the places where an author not only tells his story, but at the head of his chapter reveals his authority for it in contemporary writings, and so allows us to see just what was his “hint from history” and what use he made of it. This incident of the “White She-Devil” is a self-contained episode, one of the stray stories that history can tell. The novelist fills in the lines of the brief historical narrative. He does for it what an illustrator does for any author--he adds detail and colour and gives preciseness and a certain elaboration to the general outline, the vaguer description, that is given him to work upon. More than this, fiction somehow amplifies the whole bearings of the event, and enlarges its significance, making it almost symbolic; and further provides links, that a reader can identify and put his finger upon, slight links, just the necessary connections that bring the affair into its place in the whole book, and so form the excuse for its presence in the novel at all. But the most noticeable thing of all is not merely the episodic nature of the material that is taken from history to be incorporated in fiction but the episodic treatment that is given to it. The stage is set for this particular incident, and when it is completed the curtain falls and we are carried away to a totally different scene. A wealth of historical detail is grouped around this one episode; the episode is the thing that the whole section of the book clusters around. When this anecdote has been worked into a picture the author takes up an entirely new canvas, and starts over again for the next, raising up a fresh historic background for it. In this way one thing succeeds another like slides displacing one another in a lantern, a shutter separating each; things do not run into one another with the connectedness of a film. If the episodic novel reaches a unity at all, its episodes are generally related to one another as facets of a diamond, rather than as links in a chain; the spectator changes his ground, his point of vision in passing from one to another; he does not slide unconsciously from one episode to the next.