I remember the story-telling days vividly. They were a difficult and
exacting audience--those little creatures.

Along one side of the library, in the Hartford home, the bookshelves
joined the mantelpiece--in fact there were shelves on both sides of the
mantelpiece. On these shelves, and on the mantelpiece, stood various
ornaments. At one end of the procession was a framed oil-painting of a
cat's head, at the other end was a head of a beautiful young girl,
life-size--called Emmeline, because she looked just about like that--an
impressionist water-color. Between the one picture and the other there
were twelve or fifteen of the bric-a-brac things already mentioned; also
an oil-painting by Elihu Vedder, "The Young Medusa." Every now and then
the children required me to construct a romance--always impromptu--not a
moment's preparation permitted--and into that romance I had to get all
that bric-a-brac and the three pictures. I had to start always with the
cat and finish with Emmeline. I was never allowed the refreshment of a
change, end-for-end. It was not permissible to introduce a bric-a-brac
ornament into the story out of its place in the procession.

These bric-a-bracs were never allowed a peaceful day, a reposeful day, a
restful Sabbath. In their lives there was no Sabbath, in their lives
there was no peace; they knew no existence but a monotonous career of
violence and bloodshed. In the course of time, the bric-a-brac and the
pictures showed wear. It was because they had had so many and such
tumultuous adventures in their romantic careers.

As romancer to the children I had a hard time, even from the beginning.
If they brought me a picture, in a magazine, and required me to build a
story to it, they would cover the rest of the page with their pudgy
hands to keep me from stealing an idea from it. The stories had to come
hot from the bat, always. They had to be absolutely original and fresh.
Sometimes the children furnished me simply a character or two, or a
dozen, and required me to start out at once on that slim basis and
deliver those characters up to a vigorous and entertaining life of
crime. If they heard of a new trade, or an unfamiliar animal, or
anything like that, I was pretty sure to have to deal with those things
in the next romance. Once Clara required me to build a sudden tale out
of a plumber and a "bawgunstrictor," and I had to do it. She didn't
know what a boa-constrictor was, until he developed in the