t. The more I think of it, the more I
am moved to press upon the world my question: Who are the Little People?
They are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in
his financial worries and have an eye to the bank-book; they share
plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to build the
scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive
order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond
doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep
him all the while in ignorance of where they aim. Who are they, then?
and who is the dreamer?

Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less a
person than myself;--as I might have told you from the beginning, only
that the critics murmur over my consistent egotism;--and as I am
positively forced to tell you now, or I could advance but little further
with my story. And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but
just my Brownies, God bless them! who do one-half my work for me while I
am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well,
when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. That part
which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond
contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means
necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it
even then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience. For
myself--what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland
unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with the
conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat and the
boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the
general elections--I am sometimes tempted to suppose is no story-teller
at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any
cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in actuality; so that, by
that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the
single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen
collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the
praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the
pudding. I am an excellent adviser, something like Moliere's servant. I
pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and
sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the
sitting at the tabl