pressed my point again with the earnestness and anxiety that I
really felt.

Evidently touched by the manner of my appeal to him even more than
by the language in which it was expressed, Morgan took refuge in his
customary abruptness, spread out his paper violently on the table,
seized his pen and ink, and told me quite fiercely to give him his work
and let him tackle it at once.

I set myself to recall to his memory some very remarkable experiences
of his own in his professional days, but he stopped me before I had half
done.

"I understand," he said, taking a savage dip at the ink, "I'm to make
her flesh creep, and to frighten her out of her wits. I'll do it with a
vengeance!"

Reserving to myself privately an editorial right of supervision over
Morgan's contributions, I returned to my own room to begin my share--by
far the largest one--of the task before us. The stimulus applied to my
mind by my son's letter must have been a strong one indeed, for I had
hardly been more than an hour at my desk before I found the old literary
facility of my youthful days, when I was a writer for the magazines,
returning to me as if by magic. I worked on unremittingly till
dinner-time, and then resumed the pen after we had all separated for
the night. At two o'clock the next morning I found myself--God help
me!--masquerading, as it were, in my own long-lost character of a
hard-writing young man, with the old familiar cup of strong tea by my
side, and the old familiar wet towel tied round my head.

My review of the progress I had made, when I looked back at my pages of
manuscript, yielded all the encouragement I wanted to drive me on. It
is only just, however, to add to the record of this first day's attempt,
that the literary labor which it involved was by no means of the
most trying kind. The great strain on the intellect--the strain of
invention--was spared me by my having real characters and events
ready to my hand. If I had been called on to create, I should, in all
probability, have suffered severely by contrast with the very worst
of those unfortunate novelists whom Jessie had so rashly and so
thoughtlessly condemned. It is not wonderful that the public should
rarely know how to estimate the vast service which is done to them by
the production of a good book, seeing that they are, for the most part,
utterly ignorant of the immense difficulty of writing even a bad one.

The next day was fine, to my great relief; and our vis