60
VII Letters to a Mother 72
VIII Across the Rubicon 87
IX The Interview for the "Evening Mail" 96
X Anna enjoys Ill-health 112
XI Miss Bibby's Holiday 126
XII In Black and White 135
XIII An Interview with the Interviewer 144
XIV The Literary Microbe 156
XV "Out of the Mouths of Babes" 170
XVI Wooing the Muse 179
XVII Literature is Low 190
XVIII An Editing Pencil 197
XIX Max Runs Amuck 205
XX A Lesson in Discipline 216
XXI In Print at last 227
XXII A Master Mind 229
XXIII The Picnic at the Falls 243
XXIV At the Second Fall 259

CHAPTER I

SOMEWHAT CONTAGIOUS

It is October and the mountains are waking from their short winter
sleep.

It is October, the month of the moving mists.

Come and let us take a walk, not down Fleet Street with Dr. Johnson, but
up a mountain side with Nature,--nay, with God Himself. There is nothing
to see, absolutely nothing at all. You know that there are trees on
either hand of you, and that the undergrowth is bursting into the stars
and delicate bells of its springtime bloom. But your knowledge of this
is merely one of the services your memory does for you, for the mist has
covered it all away from sight.

You look behind you and your world is blotted out.

You look in front of you,--nay, you cannot look in front of you, for the
mist lies as a veil, actually on your face.

"I breathed up a whole cloud this morning," Lynn remarked once.

"I eated one--and it was nasty," said Max.

Still you continue to look in front of you as far as may be.

And the next moment the veil lifts,--clean up over your head perhaps,
and you see it rolling away on the wind to one side of you, yards and
yards of flying white gossamer, its ragged edges catching in the trees.

And now your gaze le