d "Please return at once to 6,
Bouverie Street." My office boy being out, and Bouverie Street being
only a few steps away, I took it over myself, and found myself, somewhat
to my surprise, in the office of Henry & Co., publishers, and in the
presence of Mr. J. Hannaford Bennett, an active partner in the firm. He
greeted me by name, also to my surprise, and told me he had heard me
speak at the Playgoers' Club. A little conversation ensued, and he
mentioned that his firm was going to bring out a Library of Wit and
Humour. I told him I had begun a book, avowedly humorous, and had
written two chapters of it, and he straightway came over to my office,
heard me read them, and immediately secured the book. (The then editor
ultimately refused to have it in the "Whitefriars' Library of Wit and
Humour," and so it was brought out separately.) Within three months,
working in odds and ends of time, I finished it, correcting the proofs
of the first chapters while I was writing the last; indeed, ever since
the day I read those two chapters to Mr. Hannaford Bennett I have never
written a line anywhere that has not been purchased before it was
written. For, to my undying astonishment, two average editions of my
real "First Book" were disposed of on the day of publication, to say
nothing of the sale in New York. Unless I had acquired a reputation of
which I was totally unconscious, it must have been the title that
"fetched" the trade. Or, perhaps, it was the illustrations by my friend,
Mr. George Hutchinson, whom I am proud to have discovered as a
cartoonist for _Ariel_.

[Illustration: "EDITING A COMIC PAPER."]

So here the story comes to a nice sensational climax. Re-reading it, I
feel dimly that there ought to be a moral in it somewhere for the
benefit of struggling fellow-scribblers. But the best I can find is
this: That if you are blessed with some talent, a great deal of
industry, and an amount of conceit mighty enough to enable you to
disregard superiors, equals and critics, as well as the fancied demands
of the public, it is possible, without friends, or introductions, or
bothering celebrities to read your manuscripts, or cultivating the camp
of the log-rollers, to attain, by dint of slaving day and night for
years during the flower of your youth, to a fame infinitely less
widespread than a prize-fighter's, and a pecuniary position which you
might with far less trouble have been born to.

[Illustration: "A FAME LESS WIDESPREAD