from the pride that goes before a fall. My
only resource at such times was to keep working; keep beating harder
and harder at the wall which seemed to close me in, till at last I broke
through into the daylight beyond. In this case, I had really such a very
good grip of my characters that I need not have had the usual fear of
their failure to work out their destiny. But even when the thing was
done and I carried the completed manuscript to my dear old friend, the
late Henry Loomis Nelson, then editor of the Weekly, it was in more
fear of his judgment than I cared to show. As often happened with my
manuscript in such exigencies, it seemed to go all to a handful of
shrivelled leaves. When we met again and he accepted it for the Weekly,
with a handclasp of hearty welcome, I could scarcely gasp out my
unfeigned relief. We had talked the scheme of it over together; he had
liked the notion, and he easily made me believe, after my first dismay,
that he liked the result even better.

I myself liked the hero of the tale more than I have liked worthier
men, perhaps because I thought I had achieved in him a true rustic
New England type in contact with urban life under entirely modern
conditions. What seemed to me my esthetic success in him possibly
softened me to his ethical shortcomings; but I do not expect others to
share my weakness for Jeff Durgin, whose strong, rough surname had been
waiting for his personality ever since I had got it off the side of an
ice-cart many years before.

At the time the story was imagined Harvard had been for four years much
in the direct knowledge of the author, and I pleased myself in realizing
the hero's experience there from even more intimacy with the university
moods and manners than had supported me in the studies of an earlier
fiction dealing with them. I had not lived twelve years in Cambridge
without acquaintance such as even an elder man must make with the
undergraduate life; but it is only from its own level that this can
be truly learned, and I have always been ready to stand corrected by
undergraduate experience. Still, I have my belief that as a jay--the
word may now be obsolete--Jeff Durgin is not altogether out of drawing;
though this is, of course, the phase of his character which is one of
the least important. What I most prize in him, if I may go to the bottom
of the inkhorn, is the realization of that anti-Puritan quality which
was always vexing the heart of Puritanism, and wh