ill Magazine_. I found
that its proprietor kept a banking-house in Pall Mall, and doubtful of
my welcome on Cornhill, ventured one day in my unique American
costume,--slouched hat, wide garments, and squared-toed boots,--to send
to him directly my card. He probably thought from its face that a
relative of Mr. Mason's was about to open an extensive account with him.
As it was, once admitted to his presence, he could not escape me. The
manuscript lay in his hands before he fully comprehended my purpose. He
was a fine specimen of the English publisher,--robust, ruddy,
good-naturedly acute,--and as he said with a smile that he would waive
routine and take charge of my copy, I knew that the same hands had
fastened upon the crude pages of Jane Eyre, and the best labors of
Hazlitt, Ruskin, Leigh Hunt, and Thackeray.

Two more weary weeks elapsed; I found it pleasant to work, but very
trying to wait. At the end my courage very nearly failed. I reached the
era of self-accusation; to make myself forget myself I took long, ardent
marches into the open country; followed the authors I had worshipped
through the localities they had made reverend; lost myself in
dreaminesses,--those precursors of death in the snow,--and wished myself
back in the ranks of the North, to go down in the frenzy, rather than
thus drag out a life of civil indigence, robbing at once my brains and
my stomach.

One morning, as I sat in my little Islington parlor, wishing that the
chop I had just eaten had gone farther, and taking a melancholy
inventory of the threadbare carpet and rheumatic chairs, the
door-knocker fell; there were steps in the hall; my name was mentioned.

A tall young gentleman approached me with a letter: I received him with
a strange nervousness; was there any crime in my record, I asked
fitfully, for which I had been traced to this obscure suburb for condign
arrest and decapitation? Ha! ha! it was my heart, not my lips, that
laughed. I could have cried out like Enoch Arden in his dying
apostrophe:--

"A sail! a sail!
I am saved!"

for the note, in the publisher's own handwriting, said this, and more:--

"DEAR SIR,--I shall be glad to send you fifteen guineas
immediately, in return for your article on General Pope's Campaign,
if the price will suit you."

But I suppressed my enthusiasm. I spoke patronizingly to the young
gentleman. Dr. Johnson, at the brewer's vendue, could not have been more
lear