this really gruesome story.

Somewhere about this time there appeared in Birmingham the first
illustrated provincial newspaper ever issued in England. It was called
the _Illustrated Midland News_, and its editor-in-chief was Mr Joseph
Hatton. France and Germany were at death-grips with each other, and I
wrote many sets of war verses for the new venture, and made something
like the beginning of a name. It was at this time that I first
experienced an agony which has since recurred so often that by dint of
mere repetition it has worn itself away to nothing. I encountered my
first misprint, a thing bad enough, in all conscience, to the mere
prose-writer, but to the ardent youngster who really believes himself to
be adding to the world's store of poetry, a thing wholly intolerable and
beyond the reach of words. Brooding over the slaughtered thousands of
Sedan, I wrote what, at the time, I conceived to be a poem.

I can recall now but a single verse of it, and that, I presume, is
kept in mind only by the misprint which blistered every nerve of me for
weeks. The verse ran thus:--

"O! pity, shame, and crime unspeakable!
Let fall the curtain, hide the ghastly show,
Yet may these horrors one stern lesson tell,
Ere the slain ranks to dull oblivion go.
These lives are counted, the Avenger waits,
His feet are heard already at the gates."

And, as I am a living sinner, some criminal compositor stuck in an "n"
for a "v," and made the stern lesson appear to exist in the fact that
"these lines" were counted. I used to wake up at night to think of
things to say to that compositor if ever I should meet him, and to the
printer's reader who passed his abominable blunder. The most indurated
professional writer who takes any interest in his work likes it to
appear before the public without this kind of disfigurement; but it is
only the beginner who experiences the full fury of pain a misprint can
inflict, and I think that even the beginner must be a poet to know all
about it.

Talking of misprints carries my mind at least a year farther forward
than I should just yet allow it to travel. Mr Edmund Yates, who was
at that time on a lecture tour in America, brought a story he was then
writing for the _Birmingham Morning News_, under the title of "A Bad
Lot," to a rather sudden and unexpected conclusion, and I was suddenly
commissioned, in the emergency, to follow him with a novel. I wrote a
first insta