a cup of coffee, with or without an egg.
Breakfast is a meal at which much time may be spent with great
advantage. People are not apt to come to it too regularly, and you may
profit by the intermission to read your newspaper and lecture on its
contents. There's no harm in spending an hour at the table.

"After breakfast do not go to work for an hour. Walk out in the garden,
lie on your back on a sofa and read, in general, 'loaf' for that hour,
and bid the servant keep out everybody who rings the bell, and work
steadily till your day's stint is done. If you have had half an hour
before breakfast, you can make two hours and a half now.

"It is just so much help if you have a good amanuensis; none, if you
have a poor one. The amanuensis should have enough else to do, but be
at liberty to attend to you when you need. Write as long as you feel
like writing; the moment you do not feel like it, give him the pen and
walk up and down the room dictating. There are those who say that they
can tell the difference between dictated work and work written by the
author. I do not believe them. I will give a share in the Combination
Protoxide Silver Mine of Grey's Gulch to anybody who will divide this
article correctly between the parts which I dictated and those which are
written with my own red right hand.

"Stick to your stint till it is done. If Philistines come in, as they
will in a finite world, deduct the time which they have stolen from you
and go on so much longer with your work till you have done what you set
out to do.

"When you have finished the stint, stop. Do not be tempted to go on
because you are in good spirits for work. There is no use in making
ready to be tired to-morrow. You may go out of doors now, you may read,
you may in whatever way get light and life for the next day. Indeed, if
you will remember that the first necessity for literary work is that you
have something ready to say before you begin, you will remember
something which most authors have thoroughly forgotten or never knew.

"This business of writing is the most exhausting known to men. You
should, therefore, steadily feed the machine with fuel. I find it a
good habit to have standing on the stove a cup of warm milk, just tinged
in color with coffee. In the days of my buoyant youth I said, 'of the
color of the cheek of a brunette in Seville.' I had then never seen a
brunette in Seville; but I have since, and I can testify that the
description was g