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The basis of all literature is adventure. A cookbook is not literature, because it merely sets down certain rules for the preparation of food. Of course, a boy who knows nothing about cooking may try to apply the rules for making a chocolate cake, and in the process may have a very exciting adventure, but the cookbook itself does not contain adventure; it is not literature.

Adventure is an experience out of the ordinary. It need not be thrilling in the sense that an escape from a wild beast or from a fire or from a treacherous bit of water may be thrilling. When Rupert Brooke became aware of the marvelous beauty of the pine-trees against the sky, and of the effect of this vision upon his sadness and despair, that was an adventure. When Wordsworth heard the lark far above him and fell to wondering about the singer and found in it a symbol of the right life, a union of aspiration and faithfulness to humble duties, that was an adventure.

The records of these adventures give us literature. The necessary element is imagination. If the poet's imagination had been asleep, he never would have given us that poem about the pinetrees and the sky. Even daily life is full of adventure, if the imagination is active. Imagination implies a zest for life. People who are intensely interested in life, in every form of life, have no lack of adventure. Life is not dull and prosy; it is filled with the spice of imagination.

In this section of your book you will find stories and poems which deal with adventures in the usual sense of the word-a thrilling or exciting experience. Some of them, such as the "Incident of the French Camp," are based on real happenings. The poet did not himself pass through the adventures; someone told him about them. Through his imagination, he was able to picture the scenes so vividly that he seemed to be present. Through his power of expression he has been able to picture them so vividly

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as to make it seem that we are present. In the poem called "The Highwayman" the poet has read an old legend to such purpose that he can make of it a dramatic and thrilling story. It is the same with Robert Louis Stevenson's story, "The Sire de Maletroit's Door." Thus stories of adventure may be based on an actual happening or on an old legend about an event that took place many years before the story was written.

A third type of story of adventure is purely imaginary: the events which it narrates never actually took place. The writer sees these imaginary events so vividly, however, that they seem as real as if they were matters of historical fact. An example is "The Masque of the Red Death," by Edgar Allan Poe. In this story details enough are given to make it seem real, and there are incidents enough to constitute a simple plot. But the extraordinary effect of the story is due to the way in which, step by step, the sense of horror is intensified so that at the end it is almost overpowering. Notice the swiftness with which the setting of the story is sketched; the characteristics of the plague; the selfish isolation of the Prince; the curious but vividly described rooms in which the revel was held. Poe had never seen such a place, of course, but so vividly does his imagination work that it is hard to believe that the castle existed only in the mind of the writer. Then, one after another, come the descriptions of the masquers, of the effect of the striking of the clock, of the appearance of the strange figure clad like a blood-stained corpse, and the story of what happened to the castle and its inmates.

In all of these stories of adventures, then, the element of imagination enters. Whether it be a personal experience, or the narration of an event in the experience of others, or a legend of old time, or a purely imaginary story, the writer sees his story in action, just as if he were at the theater looking upon a story told through action. And he tells it to you in such a way that you, too, see it in action, as though you were at the theater by the author's side.

Now in this fact lies an important lesson. You must learn to see these stories; to visualize them as though they were little

dramas. Many people do not do this. You may hear someone telling a friend a story about an acquaintance: Mr. Smith did this or that, and then this or that happened, and probably Mr. Smith will do so and so. But these statements of what happened may not bring to your mind, or even to the mind of the one to whom they are related, any pictures. You may know the events of the story, the setting in which it took place, the names of the characters, without seeing these people in action, doing these things as though they were characters in a play.

You can train your mind to do this creative reading, so that your reading becomes as interesting as a play. Try to cultivate this power as you read the following selections by asking yourself, at each point in the story, how the persons of the story look and how they behave and what the scene is. Try to plan how you would paint them if you were an artist, or what the pictures would look like if you were to have them made for the moving picture show.

For your reading of stories of adventure is your own private moving picture show, if you wish to have it that way. Such reading is a never-ending source of delight.

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Denis de Beaulieu was not yet two-and-twenty, but he counted himself a grown man, and a very accomplished cavalier into the bargain. Lads were early formed in that rough, warfaring epoch; and when one has been in a pitched battle and a dozen raids, has killed one's man in an honorable fashion, and knows a thing or two of strategy and mankind, a certain swagger in the gait is surely to be pardoned. He had put up his horse with due care, and supped with due deliberation; and then, in a very agreeable frame of mind, went out to pay a visit in the gray of the evening. 10 It was not a very wise proceeding on the young man's part. He would have done better to remain beside the fire or go decently to bed. For the town was full of troops of Burgundy and England under a mixed command; and though Denis was there on safe-conduct, his safe-conduct was like to serve him little on a 15 chance encounter.

It was September, 1429; the weather had fallen sharp; a flighty, piping wind, laden with showers, beat about the township; and the dead leaves ran riot along the streets. Here and

there a window was already lighted up; and the noise of men-atarms making merry over supper within came forth in fits and was swallowed up and carried away by the wind. The night fell swiftly; the flag of England, fluttering on the spire top, grew ¿ ever fainter and fainter against the flying clouds-a black speck like a swallow in the tumultuous, leaden chaos of the sky. As the night fell, the wind rose and began to hoot under archways and roar amid the tree-tops in the valley below the town.

Denis de Beaulieu walked fast and was soon knocking at 10 his friend's door; but though he promised himself to stay only a little while and make an early return, his welcome was so pleasant, and he found so much to delay him, that it was already long past midnight before he said good-bye upon the threshold. The wind had fallen again in the meanwhile; the night was as 15 black as the grave; not a star, nor a glimmer of moonshine, slipped through the canopy of cloud. Denis was ill-acquainted with the intricate lanes of Chateau Landon; even by daylight he had found some trouble in picking his way; and in this absolute darkness he soon lost it altogether. He was certain of one thing only— 20 to keep mounting the hill; for his friend's house lay at the lower end, or tail, of Chateau Landon, while the inn was up at the head, under the great church spire. With this clew to go upon he stumbled and groped forward, now breathing more freely in the open places where there was a good slice of sky over25 head, now feeling along the wall in stifling closes. It is an eerie and mysterious position to be thus submerged in opaque blackness in an almost unknown town. The silence is terrifying in its possibilities. The touch of cold window-bars to the exploring hand startles the man like a touch of a toad; the 30 inequalities of the pavement shake his heart into his mouth; a piece of denser darkness threatens an ambuscade or a chasm in the pathway; and where the air is brighter, the houses put on strange and bewildering appearances, as if to lead him farther from his way. For Denis, who had to regain his inn without at35 tracting notice, there was real danger as well as mere discomfort in the walk; and he went warily and boldly at once, and at every corner paused to make an observation.

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