and learning more in a day about composition than the
average schoolboy in a year. When he had copied the article a second
time and rolled it up carefully, he read in a newspaper an item on hints
to beginners, and discovered the iron law that manuscripts should never
be rolled and that they should be written on one side of the paper. He
had violated the law on both counts. Also, he learned from the item that
first-class papers paid a minimum of ten dollars a column. So, while he
copied the manuscript a third time, he consoled himself by multiplying
ten columns by ten dollars. The product was always the same, one hundred
dollars, and he decided that that was better than seafaring. If it
hadn't been for his blunders, he would have finished the article in three
days. One hundred dollars in three days! It would have taken him three
months and longer on the sea to earn a similar amount. A man was a fool
to go to sea when he could write, he concluded, though the money in
itself meant nothing to him. Its value was in the liberty it would get
him, the presentable garments it would buy him, all of which would bring
him nearer, swiftly nearer, to the slender, pale girl who had turned his
life back upon itself and given him inspiration.

He mailed the manuscript in a flat envelope, and addressed it to the
editor of the San Francisco Examiner. He had an idea that anything
accepted by a paper was published immediately, and as he had sent the
manuscript in on Friday he expected it to come out on the following
Sunday. He conceived that it would be fine to let that event apprise
Ruth of his return. Then, Sunday afternoon, he would call and see her.
In the meantime he was occupied by another idea, which he prided himself
upon as being a particularly sane, careful, and modest idea. He would
write an adventure story for boys and sell it to The Youth's Companion.
He went to the free reading-room and looked through the files of The
Youth's Companion. Serial stories, he found, were usually published in
that weekly in five instalments of about three thousand words each. He
discovered several serials that ran to seven instalments, and decided to
write one of that length.

He had been on a whaling voyage in the Arctic, once--a voyage that was to
have been for three years and which had terminated in shipwreck at the
end of six months. While his imagination was fanciful, even fantastic at
times, he had a basic love of reality th