in fifteen, stood, together with other gesticulating thumbs, before the celebrated paintings in the gallery above the schools, and had an affair of the heart. This occupied me until I was twenty-one. Then, with the numerous grandchildren of the Presbyterian the Presbyterian type-founder, now unfortunately dead, I received a very satisfactory sum of money. My cousins invested their legacies in industries or discretion; mine I immediately dissipated, mostly in Venice in the country of Italy.

We

I had a private gondola with a Turkey-red carpet and my initials in silver on the gondolier's sleeve. spent the priceless days of youth and effort-never, never to return-floating on the placid tide beyond Murano, rolling cigarettes from choice Egyptian tobacco. Just as I had accumulated two familiars-an old English gentleman whose valet always carried three overcoats for him to change with the weather, and a well-known illustrator of children's books, dying from insomnia-my money vanished and I came home with less than twenty-five cents.

II

In the period that followed, I was as convincingly detrimental as any moralist could wish. I kept what is everywhere recognized as low company, and enjoyed most the proprietor of a night-hawk cab. His name was Smith, he had been a prize fighter, and he took me to remarkable balls where it was quite nothing to beat up a policeman with any handy bottle. I met suave young Italian-American gentlemen temporarily retired from the deplorable accidents of their own cities, adroit individuals whose hands were supple with glycerine, and stout genial retired ladies with beautiful diamonds who owned apartment houses. From these I came home in

the cadaverous trolley cars of dawn.

Then one morning in early October I was leaning a swimming head from my window over an open suburban street, the air sheeted with pale gold and veiled with the pungent haze of burning leaves, when suddenly every aspect of my existence became insupportable. It was as if a voice had shouted in my ear. Within an hour, with a few necessities like books and chocolate in a glazed bag such as children carry to school, I had left forever all the past circumstances of my life. I went on a walking trip, which consisted in taking a train Harper's Ferry.

to

At the station, asking for a hotel, I encountered a woman bound for one on the bluff above and we went up together. She talked civilly, and thoroughly weary of all that I had been, I informed her that I was English, a nephew of Lord Kelvin, the astronomer-the first name that occurred to me. The hotel, except for my companion and an aging but vigorous man, was empty. We had supper at a small table lit with a single lamp in a vast shadowy place of faded summer greens; where it was revealed, as humanely as possible, that the lady was a member of a notable British family and had come to the United States to lecture on the private life of Queen Victoria, and could recognize any nephew of a nobleman across the Potomac; while the other was Simon Newcomb, the celebrated American astronomer, an intimate of Kelvin's, and perhaps the one man on the continent who knew that he had no such relative as I had announced myself to be.

Yet observe the sequel of this reprehensible fabrication-it set in motion a mild entertainment in which I learned that the lecturer was, too, a

novelist; she had produced a respectable number of volumes under the pseudonym of Lucas Cleeve; and she had the proof of one at the hotel. On the day of my arrival her eyes had failed from continual strain and the acidulous smoke of cheap cigarettes; that evening I was correcting her galley proofs, while she sat beside me with her head swathed in a damp towel, emphasizing with the cigarettes what should be noted and changed.

Throughout this process I was conscious of a growing dissatisfaction at her story, with the result that I immediately wrote a novel of my own. Naturally it was nothing more than a rather crude joke at the expense of my labor and hopes. Now, thoroughly engaged, I determined to make a further effort. In the search for a place at once quiet and inexpensive, I took a Virginia mountain stage that put me down, with a decrepit typewriter, in a little village lost in the midst of deep, narrow, green valleys and high ranges. There, in the detached part of a farmhouse on the slope beyond the village, I addressed myself to the difficulties of creative writing.

If I had had any idea of what was to follow, I would have made a more careful choice of subject, for I was condemned to rewrite over twenty times a trivial affair about a calf, a country girl, and a professor in search of health. In the course of the story the professor accidentally shot the calf

the girl he married.

The typewriter broke down at the most inconvenient moments, the lettered caps fell off and lodged in inaccessible parts of the mechanism, the type-bars tangled and the ribbon was full of holes. I would, as I thought, finish the story, and get into bed with unutter

able satisfaction, only to wake sometime in the night with the realization that I had again made an inexcusable blunder; and the following morning start a fresh page with the title which I have since mercifully forgotten.

It would be difficult to express the depth of my ignorance at that time; I could follow the superficial logic of events, and I had a vague idea, from its appearance, when a sentence was completely wrong. That was the extent of my literary knowledge and background. I spoke of writing this over twenty times, that was the entire story; a great many periods, yes, and paragraphs, were repeated a hundred or more. Eventually I knew the whole dull, stupid business by heart, and recited, with indescribable bitterness, entire pages to the trout I caught in the virgin mountain streams.

Finally I was convinced that I could do no more, and sent the manuscript to a magazine. It returned, but with an encouraging letter, a suggestion to try it with a periodical that specialized in light fiction. Light! It seemed to me the heaviest thing ever created. It was fourteen laborious years later before I sold a story.

III

Looking again about my pleasant room, this narrative seems incredible. I had left undone nearly everything I should have done and did, what is agreed, comes to nothing. Even the fourteen years of labor were systematically discouraged, or rather regarded as an ingenious defense of persistent idleness. I had literally nothing to show but baskets of wasted paper and a few printed rejection slips. A relative to whom I said "kind of things", pointed out that a literary ambition was, well-unfortunate. I

hadn't read Thackeray and didn't like Dickens, and-major crime-I never looked at the newspapers. An aunt remained awake one entire night because I mentioned Darwin. No education, you see, and no habit of industry, no background of the masters nor corner filled in the family pew; and against this only the scribbling.

Yet the result, the dark rafters and broad hearths, the emerald sod and low eaves echoing with birds, charming blue eyes, is the reward promised for industrious righteousness. There is a drawer full of heartening communications from impressive sources. Solid men in approved vocations admit me to their confidence and society.

*

* *

And only the scribbling.

Asked for explanations by a large class for the study of story writing, I sat in a silent quandary-should I admit the Duchess or tell them of the weeks in Venice, or say at once that any one of them might with great ease prove me an entire ignoramus? The instructor gently prodded me: they want to know about the tricks by which you get effects, he put in. This was not helpful. In self-defense I repeated the history of my first two published novels. One, of which a thousand copies were exempt from royalties, sold nearly nine hundred; the single financial activity connected with the other was the privilege of later buying the copyright and plates.

I was still opposed to both providence and propriety, for the subject of one novel was a boy's purity-in a world where that quality is a cause for excruciating jest-and the second the failure of an aging man to repair a spiritual wrong with gold. People, I learned, preferred to read of immaculate young women and be reassured concerning the money to the obtaining of which they sacrificed so

much. The earlier indifference gave place to a prodigious amount of advice.

It was continued by the editors who wrote me after a story or so appeared in a highly reputable place. Enthusiastic letters arrived and I answered enthusiastically with manuscripts. The admonitions: our readers demand more optimistic and vital stuff. More action! Mary, the daughter of the wealthy manufacturer, must marry Alfred, the laborer, who at imminent peril bursts open the fireescape doors locked by the villain and releases the panic-stricken girls in the loft. Still more action, if Alfred is equally the child of a wealthy manufacturer in disguise.

I was, in addition, condemned for dealing with a love slightly different from the eugenic legend of the stork, and for deducing from the movement of women's skirts that they were propelled by legs. Or else I was metaphorically pounded on the back and invited to write, for disturbing sums, gingery serials. Without conviction in either direction, I fell between. It was then discovered by the erudite that my books held actual grammatical errors-infinitives were severed, adjectives crowded in unauthorized procession. These criminal facts were exposed; yet, in spite of them, I saw a novel of mine being read in a Pullman car. In spite of them other publishers appeared and other readers.

Almost nothing can be said in defense of such a career, a composition of wilful idleness and labor, unsupported by any vision of success. It is obviously a provocation to virtue that, as a result, I should be able to smoke very long and very pale brown cigars with an import stamp on the box. I have no business with a fine Airedale terrier named after Mr. Conrad's Marlow, nor a wife with a flap

ping pink hat and the blue eyes of which I spoke. Remember the lamentable companions-Smith, the nighthawk driver and fallen prizefighter, the thieves and wasted, the tragic sensualists. Remember all the opportunities ignored-my grandfather's classic library, the education, the money.

Among the letters is a generous note from a most conservative source, speaking of my long devotion to art. It came only a little while ago, and it was that which set my mind on the past I have so inadequately unfolded. There is the obvious retort that if it had been different, I should be much further along now, more admirable. Perhaps. If my first novel had been of the "vital" sort people prefer, it might have sold half a million copies instead of nearly nine hundred. That is a consideration; but grass can be only so green, a terrier no more than faithful.

Then there are friends, personal and friends of my books, to record.

I

They must be the final indignity to the truly worthy. No one has better: they are, in the terms of the cigars, of most expensive shapes and aromas. am unable to credit the statement that one gets the friends he deserves. This, with so much else, is exceedingly mysterious.

There is brandy on the sideboard, too, and cigarettes before breakfast, and shelves of books largely condemned or ignored; but no longer, alas, the Duchess or Edward Ellis. The breeze-so finely ruffling the maples-continues to blow on the just and unjust. Babylon stands. I have written the last word of another novel preposterous now in time and setting. It will be published while countless other books written by the most exemplary will be refused, and justly annoyed superiority will endure the strain of again seeing my self-indulgent countenance looking out at them from the pages of their favorite reliable journals. Tough!