was published. I used, in those days, to get to the City at
nine and leave it at six, but I had a dinner hour, and in that dinner
hour I wrote short stories and little things that I fancied were funny,
and I used to put them in big envelopes and send them to the different
magazines. I sent about twenty out in that way. I never had one
accepted, but several returned.

[Illustration: Photo of title page of "The Social Kaleidoscope."]

I wrote my first book in my dinner hour, in a City office. I have just
found it. Here is the cover. You will observe that it has my portrait on
it. I look very ill and thin and haggard. That was, perhaps, the result
of going without my dinner in order to devote myself to 'literature.'

If you could look inside that book, if you could see the paper on which
it is printed, you would understand the shock it was to me when they
laid it in my arms and said: 'Behold your firstborn.'

All the vanity in me (and they tell me that I have a good deal) rose up
as I gazed at the battered wreck upon the cover--the man with the face
that suggested a prompt subscription to a burial club.

But I shouldn't have minded that so much if the people who bought my
book hadn't written to me personally to complain. One gentleman sent me
a postcard to say that his volume fell to pieces while he was carrying
it home. Another assured me that he had picked enough pieces of straw
out of the leaves to make a bed for his horse with, and a third returned
a copy to me without paying the postage, and asked me kindly to put it
in _my_ dustbin, because his cook was rather proud of the one he had in
his back garden.

Still the book sold (the sketches had all previously appeared in the
_Weekly Dispatch_), and when the first edition was exhausted, a new and
better one was prepared (without that haggard face upon the cover), and
I was happy.

The sale ran into thirty thousand the first year of publication, and as
I was fortunate enough to have published it on a royalty, I am glad to
say it is still selling.

[Illustration: THE SNUGGERY]

'The Social Kaleidoscope' was my first book. With it I made my actual
_debut_ between covers.

I hadn't done very well before then; since then I have, from a worldly
point of view, done remarkably well--far better than I deserved to do,
my good-natured friends assure me, and I cordially agree with them.

But I had made a good fight for it, and I had suffered years of
disappointment and