sh family kept a boarding-house up under the
roof. I had work and wages now, and could pay. On the stairs I fell
in a swoon and lay there till some one stumbled over me in the dark and
carried me in. My strength had at last given out.

So began my life as a newspaper man.

WILLIAM H. RIDEING

(1853-____)

REJECTED MANUSCRIPTS

Nowadays, it seems, every one reads, also writes. There are few
streets where the callous postman does not occasionally render some
doorstep desolate by the delivery of a rejected manuscript. Fellow
feeling makes us wondrous kind, and the first steps in the career of a
successful man of letters are always interesting. You remember how
Franklin slyly dropped his first contribution through the slit in his
brother's printing-house door; and how the young Charles Dickens crept
softly to the letter-box up a dark court, off a dark alley, near Fleet
Street.

In the case of Mr. Rideing, all must admire and be thankful for the
indomitable spirit which disappointments were unable to discourage.

From "Many Celebrities and a Few Others," by William H. Rideing.
Doubleday, Page & Co., 1913.

I do not know to a certainty just how or when the new ambition found
its cranny and sprouted, and I wonder that it did not perish at once,
like others of its kind which never blossoming were torn from the bed
that nourished them and borne afar like balls of thistledown. How and
why it survived the rest, which seemed more feasible, I am not able to
answer fully or satisfactorily to myself, and other people have yet to
show any curiosity about it.

How at this period I watched for the postman! Envelopes of portentous
bulk were put into my hands so often that I became inured to
disappointment, unsurprised and unhurt, like a patient father who has
more faith in the abilities of his children than the stupid and
purblind world which will not employ them.

These rejected essays and tales were my children, and the embarrassing
number of them did not curb my philoprogenitiveness.

Dawn broke unheeded and without reproach to the novice as he sat by
candle-light at his table giving shape and utterance to dreams which
did not foretell penalties, nor allow any intimation to reach him of
the disillusionings sure to come, sharp-edged and poignant, with the
awakening day. The rocky coast of realities, with its shoals and
whirlpools, which encircles the sphere of dreams, is never visible till
the sun is high