s. The book which
I had in mind to write was still a mass of notes. My horse, whose
transportation and tariff had cost me a thousand dollars, was of little
use to me, although I hoped to get back a part of his cost by means of a
story. My lecture on "The Joys of the Trail" promised to be moderately
successful, and yet with all these things conjoined I did not see myself
earning enough to warrant me in asking Zulime Taft or any woman to be
the daughter which my mother was so eagerly awaiting.

It was a time of halting, of transition for me. For six years--even
while writing my story of Ulysses Grant I had been absorbing the
mountain west in the growing desire to put it into fiction, and now with
a burden of Klondike material to be disposed of, I was subconsciously at
work upon a story of the plains and the Rocky Mountain foothills. In
short, as a cattleman would say, I was "milling" in the midst of a wide
landscape.

I should have gone on to New York at once, but with the alluring
associations of Taft's studio, I lingered on through November and
December, excusing myself by saying that I could work out my problem
better in my own room on Elm Street than in a hotel in New York, and as
a matter of fact I did succeed in writing several chapters of the
Colorado novel which I called _The Eagle's Heart_.

At last, late in December, I bundled my manuscripts together and set
out for the East. Perhaps this decision was hastened by some editorial
suggestion--at any rate I arrived, for I find in my diary the record of
a luncheon with Brander Matthews who said he liked my Grant book,--a
verdict which heartened me wonderfully. I believed it to be a good book
then, as I do now, but it was not selling as well as we had confidently
expected it to do and my publishers had lost interest in it.

The reason for the failure of this book was simple. The war with Spain
had thrust between the readers of my generation and the Civil War, new
commanders, new slogans and new heroes. To this later younger public
"General Grant" meant _Frederick_ Grant, and all hats were off to Dewey,
Wood and Roosevelt. "You are precisely two years late with your story of
the Great Commander," I was told, and this I was free to acknowledge.

There is an old proverb which had several times exactly described my
situation and which described it then. "It is always darkest just before
dawn," proved to be true of this particular period of discouragement,
for one day