your brain. Or if you
are of delicate taste, you fall upon your fingers. Or in the hope that
exercise will stir your wits, you pace up and down the room and press your
nose upon the window if perhaps the grocer's boy shall rouse you. Some
persons draw pictures on their pads or put pot-hooks on their letters--for
talent varies--or they roughen up their hair. I knew one gifted fellow
whose shoes presently would cramp him until he kicked them off, when at
once the juices of his intellect would flow. Genius, I am told, sometimes
locks its door and, if unrestrained, peels its outer wrappings. Or, in your
poverty, you run through the pages of a favorite volume, with a notebook
for a sly theft to start you off. In what dejection you have fallen! It is
best that you put on your hat and take your stupid self abroad.

Or maybe you think that your creative fire will blaze, if instead of
throwing in your wet raw thoughts, you feed it a few seasoned bits. You
open, therefore, the drawer of your desk where you keep your rejected and
broken fragments--for your past has not been prosperous--hopeful against
experience that you can recast one of these to your present mood. This
is mournful business. Certain paragraphs that came from you hot are now
patched and shivery. Their finer meaning has run out between the lines as
though these spaces were sluices for the proper drainage of the page. You
had best put on your hat. You will get no comfort from these stale papers.

One evening lately, being in this plight, I spread out before me certain
odds and ends. I had dug deeper than usual in the drawer and had brought up
a yellow stratum of a considerable age. I was poring upon these papers and
was wondering whether I could fit them to a newer measure, when I heard a
slight noise behind me. I glanced around and saw that a man had entered the
room and was now seated in a chair before the fire. In the common nature
of things this should have been startling, for the hour was late--twelve
o'clock had struck across the way--and I had thought that I was quite
alone. But there was something so friendly and easy in his attitude--he
was a young man, little more than a lanky boy--that instead of being
frightened, I swung calmly around for a better look. He sat with his legs
stretched before him and with his chin resting in his hand, as though in
thought. By the light that fell on him from the fire, I saw that he wore a
brown checked suit and that he was c