presumption, and with something of the despair of a shipwrecked mariner
my eyes rested on the green expanses of those book-backs, Bohn's Standard
Library! Nor did it occur to him or to me that one might be great in
literature without having read so much as a gritty page of them....

He finished his argument by reminding me that worthless persons sought to
enter the arts in the search for a fool's paradise, and in order to
satisfy a reprehensible craving for notoriety. The implication was clear,
that imaginative production could not be classed as hard work. And he
assured me that literature was a profession in which no one could afford
to be second class. A Longfellow, a Harriet Beecher Stowe, or nothing.
This was a practical age and a practical country. We had indeed produced
Irvings and Hawthornes, but the future of American letters was, to say
the least, problematical. We were a utilitarian people who would never
create a great literature, and he reminded me that the days of the
romantic and the picturesque had passed. He gathered that I desired to be
a novelist. Well, novelists, with certain exceptions, were fantastic
fellows who blew iridescent soap-bubbles and who had no morals. In the
face of such a philosophy as his I was mute. The world appeared a dreary
place of musty offices and smoky steel-works, of coal dust, of labour
without a spark of inspiration. And that other, the world of my dreams,
simply did not exist.

Incidentally my father had condemned Cousin Robert's wholesale grocery
business as a refuge of the lesser of intellect that could not achieve
the professions,--an inference not calculated to stir my ambition and
liking for it at the start.

I began my business career on the following Monday morning. At breakfast,
held earlier than usual on my account, my mother's sympathy was the more
eloquent for being unspoken, while my father wore an air of unwonted
cheerfulness; charging me, when I departed, to give his kindest
remembrances to my Cousin Robert Breck. With a sense of martyrdom somehow
deepened by this attitude of my parents I boarded a horse-car and went
down town. Early though it was, the narrow streets of the wholesale
district reverberated with the rattle of trucks and echoed with the
shouts of drivers. The day promised to be scorching. At the door of the
warehouse of Breck and Company I was greeted by the ineffable smell of
groceries in which the suggestion of parched coffee prevailed. This