other wants to
know if she is to add water to that medicine.' 'Certainly, certainly.'
Not that it matters in the least, but it is well to answer with
decision. Exit the little boy, and the splice is about half accomplished
when he suddenly bursts into the room again. 'Please, doctor, when I got
back mother had taken the medicine without the water.' 'Tut, tut!' I
answer. 'It really does not matter in the least.' The youth withdraws
with a suspicious glance, and one more paragraph has been written when
the husband puts in an appearance. 'There seems to have been some
misunderstanding about that medicine,' he remarks coldly. 'Not at all,'
I say, 'it really didn't matter.' 'Well, then, why did you tell the boy
that it should be taken with water?' And then I try to disentangle the
business, and the husband shakes his head gloomily at me. 'She feels
very queer,' says he; 'we should all be easier in our minds if you came
and looked at her.' So I leave my heroine in the four-foot way with an
express thundering towards her, and trudge sadly off, with the feeling
that another morning has been wasted, and another seam left visible to
the critic's eye in my unhappy novel. Such was the genesis of my
sensational romance, and when publishers wrote to say that they could
see no merit in it, I was, heart and soul, of the same way of thinking.

[Illustration: MR. ANDREW LANG]

And then, under more favourable circumstances, I wrote 'Micah Clarke,'
for patients had become more tractable, and I had married, and in every
way I was a brighter man. A year's reading and five months' writing
finished it, and I thought I had a tool in my hands that would cut a
path for me. So I had, but the first thing that I cut with it was my
finger. I sent it to a friend, whose opinion I deeply respected, in
London, who read for one of the leading houses, but he had been bitten
by the historical novel, and very naturally he distrusted it. From him
it went to house after house, and house after house would have none of
it. Blackwood found that the people did not talk so in the seventeenth
century; Bentley that its principal defect was that there was a complete
absence of interest; Cassells that experience had shown that an
historical novel could never be a commercial success. I remember smoking
over my dog-eared manuscript when it returned for a whiff of country air
after one of its descents upon town, and wondering what I should do if
some sporting, reckless k