rised than myself when I discovered that I
could write decent prose, and even make money out of it, for during many
years my youthful aspirations had been to rival Rossetti, or get on a
level with Browning, rather than to make a living out of literature as a
profession. But when I did start a book, I went through three years of
American experience like fire through flax, and wrote 'The Western
Avernus,' a volume containing ninety-three thousand words, in less than
a lunar month.

[Illustration: BEFORE THE MAST]

I had been in Australia years before, coming home before the mast as an
A.B. in a Blackwall liner, but my occasional efforts to turn that
experience into form always failed. Once or twice, I read some of my
prose to friends, who told me that it was worse even than my poetry.
Such criticism naturally confirmed me in the belief that I must be a
poet or nothing, and I soon got into a fair way to become nothing, for
my health broke down. At last, finding my choice lay between two kinds
of tragedies, I chose the least, and went off to Texas. On February 27,
1884, I was working in a Government office as a writer; on March 27, I
was sheep-herding in Scurry County, North-west Texas, in the south of
the Panhandle. This experience was the opening of 'The Western Avernus.'

[Illustration: I MARRIED THEM ALL OFF AT THE END]

But I should never have written the book if it had not been for two
friends of mine. One was George Gissing, and the other W. H. Hudson, the
Argentine naturalist. When I returned from the West, and yarned to them
of starvation and toil and strife in that new world, they urged me to
put it down instead of talking it. I suppose they looked on it as good
material running to verbal conversational waste, being both writers of
many years' standing. Now I understand their point of view, and carry a
note-book, or an odd piece of paper, to jot down motives that crop up in
occasional talk, but then I was ignorant, and astonished at the wild
notion of writing anything saleable. However, in desperation, for I had
no money, I began to write, and went ahead in the same way that I have
so far kept to. I wrote it without notes, without care, without
thought, save that each night the past was resurgent and alive before
and within me, just as it was when I worked and starved between Texas
and the great North-west. Each Sunday I read what I had done to George
Gissing; at first with terror, but afterwards with more conf