artin's good fortune rose. The day after Ruth's visit, he
received a check for three dollars from a New York scandal weekly in
payment for three of his triolets. Two days later a newspaper published
in Chicago accepted his "Treasure Hunters," promising to pay ten dollars
for it on publication. The price was small, but it was the first article
he had written, his very first attempt to express his thought on the
printed page. To cap everything, the adventure serial for boys, his
second attempt, was accepted before the end of the week by a juvenile
monthly calling itself Youth and Age. It was true the serial was twenty-
one thousand words, and they offered to pay him sixteen dollars on
publication, which was something like seventy-five cents a thousand
words; but it was equally true that it was the second thing he had
attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly aware of its clumsy
worthlessness.

But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness of
mediocrity. What characterized them was the clumsiness of too great
strength--the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he crushes
butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes with a
war-club. So it was that Martin was glad to sell his early efforts for
songs. He knew them for what they were, and it had not taken him long to
acquire this knowledge. What he pinned his faith to was his later work.
He had striven to be something more than a mere writer of magazine
fiction. He had sought to equip himself with the tools of artistry. On
the other hand, he had not sacrificed strength. His conscious aim had
been to increase his strength by avoiding excess of strength. Nor had he
departed from his love of reality. His work was realism, though he had
endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and beauties of imagination. What
he sought was an impassioned realism, shot through with human aspiration
and faith. What he wanted was life as it was, with all its
spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.

He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction.
One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other
treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine
possibilities. Both the god and the clod schools erred, in Martin's
estimation, and erred through too great singleness of sight and purpose.
There was a compromise that approximated the truth, though it flattered
not the school of god,