should not like to intimate anything mystical in the fact. It became,
to my thinking, the most vital of my fictions, through my quickened
interest in the life about me, at a moment of great psychological
import. We had passed through a period of strong emotioning in the
direction of the humaner economics, if I may phrase it so; the rich
seemed not so much to despise the poor, the poor did not so hopelessly
repine. The solution of the riddle of the painful earth through the
dreams of Henry George, through the dreams of Edward Bellamy, through
the dreams of all the generous visionaries of the past, seemed not
impossibly far off. That shedding of blood which is for the remission of
sins had been symbolized by the bombs and scaffolds of Chicago, and
the hearts of those who felt the wrongs bound up with our rights, the
slavery implicated in our liberty, were thrilling with griefs and hopes
hitherto strange to the average American breast. Opportunely for me
there was a great street-car strike in New York, and the story began to
find its way to issues nobler and larger than those of the love-affairs
common to fiction. I was in my fifty-second year when I took it up, and
in the prime, such as it was, of my powers. The scene which I had chosen
appealed prodigiously to me, and the action passed as nearly without my
conscious agency as I ever allow myself to think such things happen.

The opening chapters were written in a fine, old fashioned apartment
house which had once been a family house, and in an uppermost room of
which I could look from my work across the trees of the little park in
Stuyvesant Square to the towers of St. George's Church. Then later in
the spring of 1889 the unfinished novel was carried to a country house
on the Belmont border of Cambridge. There I must have written very
rapidly to have pressed it to conclusion before the summer ended. It
came, indeed, so easily from the pen that I had the misgiving which I
always have of things which do not cost me great trouble.

There is nothing in the book with which I amused myself more than the
house-hunting of the Marches when they were placing themselves in New
York; and if the contemporary reader should turn for instruction to the
pages in which their experience is detailed I assure him that he may
trust their fidelity and accuracy in the article of New York housing as
it was early in the last decade of the last century: I mean, the housing
of people of such mode