think through these three parts so as to relate them interestingly and
naturally one to the other; and if you want to assimilate the best that
is in the following stories, you will do well to approach them by the
same three routes.

The Setting or Background gives us the time and the place of the story
with such details of custom, scenery, and dialect as time and place
imply. It answers the questions _When? Where?_ The Plot tells us what
happened. It gives us the incidents and events, the haps or mishaps,
that are interwoven to make up the warp and woof of the story. Sometimes
there is hardly any interweaving; just a plain plan or simple outline is
followed, as in "The Christmas Carol" or "The Great Stone Face." We may
still call the core of these two stories the Plot, if we want to, but
Plan would be the more accurate. This part of the story answers the
question _What_? Under the heading Characters or Character we study the
personalities of the men and women who move through the story and give
it unity and coherence. Sometimes, as in "The Christmas Carol" or
"Markheim," one character so dominates the others that they are mere
spokes in his hub or incidents in his career. But in "The Gift of the
Magi," though more space is given to Della, she and Jim act from the
same motive and contribute equally to the development of the story. In
one of our stories the main character is a dog, but he is so human that
we may still say that the chief question to be answered under this
heading is _Who?_

Many books have been written about these three parts of a short story,
but the great lesson to be learned is that the excellence of a story,
long or short, consists not in the separate excellence of the Setting or
of the Plot or of the Characters but in the perfect blending of the
three to produce a single effect or to impress a single truth. If the