“There! You can’t read! I told you so!”
“But——”
“But,” interrupts Samson, cold and dry, “but why do you join the adverb to the noun rather than to the verb? What kind of an Oak is an Oak one day? No kind at all! There is no such tree! Why, then, do you say: the Oak one day, said to the Reed? This is the way it should go: the Oak (comma) one day said to the Reed. You understand, of course?”
“Certainly I do,” replies the other, a new light breaking on him. “It seems as if there should be an invisible comma after Oak!”
“You are right, sir,” continues the master. “Every passage has a double set of punctuation marks, one visible, the other invisible; one is the printer’s work, the other the reader’s.”
“The reader’s? Does the reader also punctuate?”
“Certainly he does, quite independently too of the printer’s points, though it must be acknowledged that sometimes both coincide. By a certain cadenced silence the reader marks his period; by a half silence, his comma; by a certain accent, an interrogation; by a certain tone, an exclamation. And I must assure you that it is exclusively on the skillful distribution of these insensible points that not only the interest of the story, but actually its clearness, its comprehensibility, altogether depends.”