weather will not improve for a duke, it is
not likely to change for a mere person of letters. Thus the devotee of
the Muses is driven back, by stress of climate, upon literature, and as
there is nothing in the lodge to read he is compelled to write.

Now certainly one would not lack material, if only one were capable of
the art of fiction. The genesis of novels and stories is a topic little
studied, but I am inclined to believe that, like the pearls in the
mussels of the river, fiction is a beautiful disease of the brain.
Something, an incident or an experience, or a reflection, gets imbedded,
incrusted, in the properly constituted mind, and becomes the nucleus of a
pearl of romance. Mr. Marion Crawford, in a recent work, describes his
hero, who is a novelist, at work. This young gentleman, by a series of
faults or misfortunes, has himself become a centre of harrowing emotion.
Two young ladies, to each of whom he has been betrothed, are weeping out
their eyes for him, or are kneeling to heaven with despairing cries, or
are hardening their hearts to marry men for whom they "do not care a
bawbee." The hero's aunt has committed a crime; everybody, in fact, is
in despair, when an idea occurs to the hero. Indifferent to the sorrows
of his nearest and dearest, he sits down with his notion and writes a
novel--writes like a person possessed.

He has the proper kind of brain, the nucleus has been dropped into it,
the pearl begins to grow, and to assume prismatic hues. So he is happy,
and even the frozen-out angler might be happy if he could write a novel
in the absence of salmon. Unluckily, my brain is not capable of this
aesthetic malady, and to save my life, or to "milk a fine warm cow rain,"
as the Zulus say, I could not write a novel, or even a short story. About
The Short Story, as they call it, with capital letters, our critical
American cousins have much to say. Its germ, one fancies, is usually an
incident, or a mere anecdote, according to the nature of the author's
brain; this germ becomes either the pearl of a brief _conte_, or the seed
of a stately tree, in three volumes. An author of experience soon finds
out how he should treat his material. One writer informs me that, given
the idea, the germinal idea, it is as easy for him to make a novel out of
it as a tale--as easy, and much more satisfactory and remunerative.
Others, like M. Guy de Maupassant, for example, seem to find their
strength in brevity, in