th him it was the time when the mind is, or
ought to be, at its best, the body at its freshest and hungriest.
Discussions of the latest plays and novels, the doings and undoings of
statesmen, laughter and sentiment--to him, at breakfast, these things
were as important as sausages and thick cream.

"Breakfast over, there was no dawdling and putting off of the day's
work (else how, at eleven sharp, could tennis be played with a free
conscience?). Loving, as he did, everything connected with a
newspaper, he would now pass by those on the hall-table with never so
much as a wistful glance, and hurry to his workroom.

"He wrote sitting down. He wrote standing up. And, almost you may
say, he wrote walking up and down. Some people, accustomed to the
delicious ease and clarity of his style, imagine that he wrote very
easily. He did and he didn't. Letters, easy, clear, to the point, and
gorgeously human, flowed from him without let or hindrance. That
masterpiece of corresponding, the German March through Brussels, was
probably written almost as fast as he could talk (next to Phillips
Brooks, he was the fastest talker I ever heard), but when it came to
fiction he had no facility at all. Perhaps I should say that he held
in contempt any facility that he may have had. It was owing to his
incomparable energy and Joblike patience that he ever gave us any
fiction at all. Every phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad
phrases he could think of, the fittest in his relentless judgment to
survive. Phrases, paragraphs, pages, whole stories even, were written
over and over again. He worked upon a principle of elimination. If he
wished to describe an automobile turning in at a gate, he made first a
long and elaborate description from which there was omitted no detail,
which the most observant pair of eyes in Christendom had ever noted
with reference to just such a turning. Thereupon he would begin a
process of omitting one by one those details which he had been at such
pains to recall; and after each omission he would ask himself, 'Does
the picture remain?' If it did not, he restored the detail which he
had just omitted, and experimented with the sacrifice of some other,
and so on, and so on, until after Herculean labor there remained for
the reader one of those swiftly flashed ice-clear pictures (complete in
every detail) with which his tales and romances are so delightfully and
continuously adorned.

"But it is quarter