two o'clock
Stevenson has here patterned a passage of life along lines of causation ; he has employed the logical method of narration : but Pepys , in the selection quoted , looked upon events with no narrative sense whatever . = The Narrative Sense . = -- The narrative sense is , primarily , an ability to trace an event back to its logical causes and to look forward to its logical effects . It is the sense through which we realize , for instance , that what happened at two o'clock to-day , although it may not have resulted necessarily from what happened an hour before , was the logical outcome of something else that happened at noon on the preceding Thursday , let us say , and that this in turn was the result of causes stretching back through many months . A well-developed narrative sense in looking on at life is very rare . Every one , of course , is able to refer the headache of the morning after to the hilarity if the night before ; and even , after some experience , to foresee the headache at the time of the hilarity : but life , to the casual eye of the average man , hides in the main the secrets of its series , and betrays only an illogical succession of events . Minds cruder than the average see only a jumble of happenings in the life they look upon , and group them , if at all , by propinquity in time , rather than by any deeper law of relation .