INCIDENT HINTS

As a character hint is an act suggestive of character and a mood hint an act suggestive of mood, so an incident hint is an act suggestive of an incident. In each case that which does the suggesting is an effect. Back of an effect there is always a cause, and seeing the effect or hint, the imagination at once becomes active to determine its cause. When this cause lies in neither character nor mood, it must lie in an incident, and the result is the incident hint.
A bicycle twisted and broken at the foot of a precipitous hill will cause the imagination to picture the incident lying back of the fact. Blood-spots on the stones will be still more suggestive. A rapidly increasing crowd at a corner where the steel frame of a 22-story sky-scraper is being completed, together with the clang-clang-clang of its gong as an ambulance hurries to the scene, will kindle the imagination to learn the cause lying behind the effect. A hunting dog rushing home from the woods without his master, pawing at the doors and pulling with his teeth, will hurry off the anxious family to learn the incident back of the actions. So a team of carriage horses dashing into the yard with harness broken will set the mother all a-tremble for the children that an hour before went driving. Every day one sees events of this kind that have their causes in incidents of varying importance.
Of a different nature are hints, or rather, signs, such as smoke leaving a chimney, or a flag at the top of -its staff (showing the direction of the wind); the angle of the smoke or the stiffness of the flag (showing the velocity of the wind); a patter or rattle on a tin roof (showing rain or hail); an overcoat splashed with mud on only one side; a boy's clothes covered with snow; wet hair and shirt wrong side out when a lad comes home late on a summer afternoon; the raised umbrellas of persons passing; furs and heavy overcoats with upturned collars; bells ringing at 8.30 in the morning, etc.
' These are effects that have back of them a cause; but the cause is determined more by the intellect than by the imagination. We know the cause of such signs rather than feel it. They have some suggestive value, to be sure, but hardly enough, as a rule, to set the imagination to work, and consequently they should not be given so much weight as a true incident hint.
Partaking somewhat of the characteristics of both the incident hint and the sign are the rapid pulse, the furred tongue, the aching back and limbs, the loss of appetite, and the other symptoms that enable a physician to determine approximately the cause of an illness. At times the physician is compelled to depend upon his imagination in making a diagnosis; more often his intellect at once tells him the trouble; while occasionally both intellect and imagination are called into requisition. For the mother whose child has developed any acute symptoms of disease, such symptoms are often incident hints of serious suggestive power. Effects of this kind should always be judged by their effectiveness. If they arouse the imagination they are true incident hints.
II
Both in life and in literature incident hints are less frequent and less important than character and mood hints. Yet the artistic writer is by no means neglectful of this tool. He finds it useful in enchaining the reader's attention, in giving his characters opportunity to show their moods or their real selves, in clearing up mysteries, in serving as the foundation of a story, and in many other ways.
For example, Poe's story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," has r.s its foundation nothing except the signs that the murderer leaves behind him. Dupin, considering these signs carefully, finds in them a series of hints enabling him to image again the incidents of the murders exactly as they occurred and to discover the murderer. The whole story hinges upon Dupin's (that is, Poe's) power to find by induction the causes suggested by these effects, or hints. No doubt the intellect helps in such a case, but the ,imagination, the power to put one's self into the place of another, renders far more efficient service.
In "Silas Marner" George Eliot writes:
• There were only three hiding places where he had ever heard
of cottagers' hoards being found: the thatch, the bed, and a hole in the floor. Marner's cottage had no thatch; and Dunstan's first act, after a train of thought made rapid by the stimulus of cupidity, was to go up to the bed; but while he did so, his eyes travelled eagerly over the floor, where the bricks, distinct in the fire-light, were discernible under the sprinkling of sand. But not everywhere; for there was one spot, and one only, which was quite covered with sand, and sand showing the marks of fingers, which had apparently been careful to spread it over a given space. . . . In an instant Dunstan darted to the spot.
There was a commotion in Roaring Camp. It could not have baen a fight, for in 1850 that was not novel enough to have called together the entire settlement. The ditches and claims were not only deserted, but "Tuttle's grocery" had contributed its gamblers, who, it will be remembered, calmly continued their game the day that French Pete and lianaka Joe shot each other to death over the bar in the front room.