eak of has come to me with
the request that I should write a book for them. I have never been able
to do so, but I have outgrown my bitterness, and, of course, I show no
malice. Indeed, I have now the best reasons for wishing the great
enterprise well. But if literary confessions are worth anything, this
one may perhaps be a seed that will somewhere find grateful soil. Keep a
good heart, even if you have to knock in vain at many doors, and kick
about the backstairs of the house of letters. There is room enough
inside.

[Illustration: MY MS. WENT SPRAWLING OVER THE TABLE.]

[Illustration: DERWENTWATER]

I wrote and edited sundry things during my first years in London, but
not until I had published a story did I feel that I had so much as
touched the consciousness of the public.

Hence, my first novel may very properly be regarded as my first book,
and if I have no tale to tell of heart-broken impediments in getting it
published, I have something to say of the difficulty of getting it
written. The novel is called 'The Shadow of a Crime,' but title it had
none until it was finished, and a friend christened it. I cannot
remember when the story was begun, because I cannot recall a time when
the idea of it did not exist in my mind. Something of the same kind is
true of every tale I have ever written or shall ever write. I think it
must be in the nature of imagination that an imaginative idea does not
spring into being, that it has no spontaneous generation, but, as a
germinating conception, a shadow of a vision, always comes floating from
somewhere out of the back chambers of memory. You are waiting for the
central thought that shall link together incidents that you have gleaned
from among the stubble of many fields, for the _motif_ that shall put
life and meaning into the characters that you have gathered and grouped,
and one morning, as you awake, just at that moment when you are between
the land of light and the mists of sleep, and as your mind is grappling
back for the vanishing form of some delicious dream, a dim but familiar
ghost of an idea comes up unbidden for the hundredth time, and you say
to yourself, with surprise at your own stupidity, 'That's it!'

[Illustration: STY HEAD PASS]

The idea of my first novel moved about me in this way for many years
before I recognised it. As usually happens, it came in the shape of a
story. I think it was, in actual fact, first of all, a tale of a
grandfather. My mother's