Particular accounts have to do with those small happenings that seem to come by chance, those events that form, as it were, complete and detachable bits of life. That is to say, each relation is of something that has taken place or been witnessed in a comparatively short time--an incident of a trip downtown, a characteristic action of a great man, an important political event, an adventure, a brief series of pleasures. I. The Incident [Definition] The word "incident" comes from the Latin and means "falling upon or into something, impinging from without;" hence something depending upon or contained in another thing, as its principal. In narrative, then, it is the record of a subordinate act or of an event happening at the same time as some other event and of less importance. Any little occurrence may be considered an incident. The report of it generally has excuse for being in the fact that knowledge of it throws light on the main event or intensifies interest therein. Accordingly every good narrative of this type possesses a horizon larger than itself. Somewhere within the story there is a clause connecting the event with other occurrences or with the prime occurrence. [How to tell an incident] An incident may or may not be an eye-witness account. Indeed, an incident may be told by a person removed the third, the hundredth degree from the happening. The essential thing is the evidence of reality. Of course there are fictitious incidents--like those in "Robinson Crusoe"--but the whole care of the writer in such cases is to simulate truth. Very often a work of fiction is but a skillful piecing together of actual small happenings. An incident is valued in itself for one of two reasons--either for the fact which it records or for the author's humanity revealed in the narration. Though slight, an incident should be well told. It need not be pointed, but it should proceed in an orderly and interesting fashion. The diction should be natural. As hinted before, an incident should have a setting. The reader ought to be able to feel something of where the characters have come from and whither they are going. The more nicely such a coherence is suggested, the more pleasing the little story will be. One thinks of the quiet delightfulness of Wordsworth's Incidents which he calls "Poems on the Naming of Places." They are small stories out of his life and the lives of his friends--natural records out of natural living, but as charming and interesting as any tale of "Naiad by the side Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere, Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance."