hoary axiom that like things performed to like things produce like
results. I'll swear that machine never did the same thing in the same
way twice. Again and again it demonstrated that unlike actions produce
like results.

How my back used to ache with it! Prior to that experience, my back had
been good for every violent strain put upon it in a none too gentle
career. But that typewriter proved to me that I had a pipe-stem for a
back. Also, it made me doubt my shoulders. They ached as with
rheumatism after every bout. The keys of that machine had to be hit so
hard that to one outside the house it sounded like distant thunder or
some one breaking up the furniture. I had to hit the keys so hard that I
strained my first fingers to the elbows, while the ends of my fingers
were blisters burst and blistered again. Had it been my machine I'd have
operated it with a carpenter's hammer.

The worst of it was that I was actually typing my manuscripts at the same
time I was trying to master that machine. It was a feat of physical
endurance and a brain storm combined to type a thousand words, and I was
composing thousands of words every day which just had to be typed for the
waiting editors.

Oh, between the writing and the typewriting I was well a-weary. I had
brain and nerve fag, and body fag as well, and yet the thought of drink
never suggested itself. I was living too high to stand in need of an
anodyne. All my waking hours, except those with that infernal
typewriter, were spent in a creative heaven. And along with this I had
no desire for drink because I still believed in many things--in the love
of all men and women in the matter of man and woman love; in fatherhood;
in human justice; in art--in the whole host of fond illusions that keep
the world turning around.

But the waiting editors elected to keep on waiting. My manuscripts made
amazing round-trip records between the Pacific and the Atlantic. It
might have been the weirdness of the typewriting that prevented the
editors from accepting at least one little offering of mine. I don't
know, and goodness knows the stuff I wrote was as weird as its typing. I
sold my hard-bought school books for ridiculous sums to second-hand
bookmen. I borrowed small sums of money wherever I could, and suffered
my old father to feed me with the meagre returns of his failing strength.

It didn't last long, only a few weeks, when I had to surrender and go to
work. Yet I wa