fortnight.

"I suppose it's something that you've got to have inside you," I
suggested to Wakeham in consolation.

"I don't think the roof of your mouth can be quite the right shape for
it," concluded Wakeham.

My success as story-teller, commentator, critic, jester, revived
my childish ambition towards authorship. My first stirrings in this
direction I cannot rightly place. I remember when very small falling
into a sunk dust-bin--a deep hole, rather, into which the gardener shot
his rubbish. The fall twisted my ankle so that I could not move; and
the time being evening and my prison some distance from the house, my
predicament loomed large before me. Yet one consolation remained with
me: the incident would be of value to me in the autobiography upon which
I was then engaged. I can distinctly recollect lying on my back among
decaying leaves and broken glass, framing my account. "On this day a
strange adventure befell me. Walking in the garden, all unheeding, I
suddenly"--I did not want to add the truth--"tumbled into a dust-hole,
six feet square, that any one but a moon calf might have seen." I
puzzled to evolve a more dignified situation. The dust-bin became a
cavern, the entrance to which had been artfully concealed; the six or
seven feet I had really fallen, "an endless descent, terminating in a
vast and gloomy chamber." I was divided between opposing desires: One,
for rescue followed by sympathy and supper; the other, for the alarming
experience of a night of terror where I lay. Nature conquering Art,
I yelled; and the episode terminated prosaically with a warm bath and
arnica. But from it I judge that desire for the woes and perils of
authorship was with me somewhat early.

Of my many other dreams I would speak freely, discussing them at length
with sympathetic souls, but concerning this one ambition I was curiously
reticent. Only to two--my mother and a grey-bearded Stranger--did I
ever breathe a word of it. Even from my father I kept it a secret, close
comrades in all else though we were. He would have talked of it much and
freely, dragged it into the light of day; and from this I shrank.

My talk with the Stranger came about in this wise. One evening I had
taken a walk to Victoria Park--a favourite haunt of mine at summer time.
It was a fair and peaceful evening, and I fell a-wandering there in
pleasant reverie, until the waning light hinted to me the question of
time. I looked about me. Only one human be