m the first.

At last, assured of its positive failure, I took what seemed to be the
most philosophic course,--neither tossing it into the Thames, after the
fashion of a famous novelist, nor littering my floor with its fragments,
and dying amidst them like a _chiffonnier_ in his den: I cut the best
paragraphs out of it, strung them together, and published it by separate
articles in the serials. My name failed to be added to the British
Museum Catalogue; but that circumstance is, at the present time, a
matter of no regret whatever.

When done with the war I took to story-writing, using many
half-forgotten incidents of American police-reporting, of border
warfare, of the development of civilization among the pioneers, of
thraldom in the South, and the gold search on the Pacific. The majority
of these travelled across the water, and were republished. And when
America, in the garb of either fact or fiction, lost novelty, I entered
the wide field of miscellaneous literature among a thousand competitors.

An author's ticket to the British Museum Reading-room put the whole
world so close around me that I could touch it everywhere. I never
entered the noble rotunda of that vast collection without an emotion of
littleness and awe. Lit only from the roof, it reminded me of the Roman
Pantheon; and truly all the gods whom I had worshipped sat, not in
statue, but in substance, along its radiating tables, or trod its
noiseless floors. Half the literature of our language flows from thence.
One may see at a glance grave naturalists knee-deep in ichthyological
tomes, or buzzing over entomology; pale zealots copying Arabic
characters, with the end to rebuild Bethlehem or the ruins of Mecca;
biographers gloating over some rare original letter; periodical writers
filching from two centuries ago for their next "new" article. The
Marquis of Lansdowne is dead; you may see the _Times_ reporter yonder
running down the events of his career. Poland is in arms again, and the
clever compiler farther on means to make twenty pounds out of it by
summing up her past risings and ruins. The bruisers King and Mace fought
yesterday, and the plodding person close by from _Bell's Life_ is
gleaning their antecedents. Half the _literati_ of our age do but like
these bind the present to the past. A great library diminishes the
number of thinkers; the grand fountains of philosophy and science ran
before types were so facile or letters became a trade.

The no