lment on the day on which the task was offered me; but I had
no experience, and no notion of a plot, and before I was through with
the business, I had so entangled my characters that my only way out of
the imbroglio I had myself created was to send every man Jack and woman
Jill of them, with the exception of the hero and the heroine, to the
bottom of a coal mine, where I comfortably drowned them all. In the
last chapter my hero asked the lady of his heart, "Are there no troubles
now?" and the lady of his heart responded, "Not one, dear Frank, not
one." And then I wrote, very neatly, and in brackets, the words, "White
Line," a professional instruction to leave the space of one line blank
between the foregoing and the following paragraphs. And the "comp." who
was entrusted with my copy, being obviously inspired of Satan, set out
the heroine's response and the trade instruction in small type,' thus,
as if it had been a line of verse:

"Not one, dear Frank, not one white line."

I think the error was repaired in time; but I remember that the author
of it was forcibly invested by his comrades with a leather medal,
and that the whole establishment below stairs revelled in beer at his
expense. In the same journal appeared a report of a speech delivered by
its own editor, who having said of Shakespeare, "We turn to the words
of this immortal writer," had a "t" knocked out for him, and was
represented as having spoken of "this immoral writer." I was with the
dear old chief at the time at which the blunder was discovered and the
most eloquent conversationalist at that time alive in England surpassed
himself. The offending "reader" was a married man with a family, and a
hard-working, conscientious creature, as a rule, and he escaped with the
mildest wigging, though I should not like to have been responsible for
the consequences which might have ensued had he been present at the
instant of discovery.

For a good many years it had been my habit to tramp of a Sunday night
some five or six miles out, and some five or six miles home, to hear
George Dawson preach at the Church of the Saviour; and it was thus that
I learned that he was to be the editor of a new daily newspaper, the
_Birmingham Morning News_, and, as I have already said, I was employed
by him at 25s. a week. He left little behind him to justify the belief
I had in him, which was shared, by the way, by a good many thousands
of people. I reckon him to have been, upon