A Handy Man Of Literature

( Originally Published 1912 )

YOUTH matures in a newspaper office faster than in any other profession, and he cannot be there for a year or two, if he has sufficient aptitude' to lift himself above the routine of the stenographer or the vagabondage of the cub reporter, without acquiring and developing a certain prudence and precision of expression and a capacity for fitting material to any dimensions prescribed for it by those in authority. He may have the desire of the moth for the star; a longing to be literary, rather than journalistic; a longing to shape his own style on the model of some favourite author, or half a dozen favourite authors; a longing to drape himself in all the ornaments of rhetoric and imagination, and to give free rein to an individuality trying to find itself; but these are liberties he dare not take while he is . subject to the spirit of impersonality and fixed standards which dominate a serious newspaper.

That spirit imposes restraints which preachers and lawyers can safely ignore : their arguments are not impaired by the embellishments of rhetoric, or by the excursions of an imagination which borrows images and flowers of speech from earth and heaven, but if either sermon or the appeal to the court were repeated in the form of an editorial, word for word, as it was spoken, eloquent as it might be, every other editor would think that the editor who sanctioned it must have gone mad.

The editorial must be logical, consistent, and, above all, concise. Wit and satire in crisp phrases it may have, the more the better; it must be lucid, direct, unambiguous, and undelayed by verbosity; the art of it is in verbal thrift, not in luxuriance of diction, and it must. have the appearance of completeness and finality, though very likely the clock has struck and the measure been filled while the writer of it has been only in the middle of the matter he could have put into it but for the limitations of space.

I never read the editorial pages of clean and responsible newspapers without admiring the knowledge, the unity of style, and the general excellence of craftsmanship visible in the articles which, inevitably prepared in a heat, give no signs of hurry. The homogeneity of form is a wonder in itself. Though different hands are employed they work in one fashion, and the whole page has the effect of having been moulded by one man, whose material might have been a liquid pouring out of one tap and stopping automatically, after filling to the brim vessels of various sizes and one label, without over-flowing or wasting a drop, Whether he is young or old the individual disappears in the collective spirit of " the paper," with the traditions and usages of which he is obliged to conform whatever his idiosyncrasies may be.

"The paper!" The staff speak of it as of omnipotence, of something higher than anything else in the world, and of a supernal power which requires on all occasions instant obedience and complete self-effacement. They coalesce in it like nebulae drawn into a planet.

So, if he is wise, the novice quickly falls into the groove and fills his pint pot of paragraphs as neatly as he can in the hope that by and by the larger measure may be granted to him. His sprigs of verse wither in an album; the eagle wings of imagination that were to bear him heavenward are clipped; he picks up his food, scraping the ground which has no other recommendation than its stability.

When my eyes were again able to front the sun after a threatening blindness my oculist advised me against going back to night work, and I declared my intention of trying the career of a free lance, that is, of writing books and articles for the magazines, and living on what I could earn in that way. I remember as though I had seen it yesterday the dubiety which creased Doctor Holland's brow when I told him. Who knows that name now? The mention of it hardly stirs an echo. Do the books it was attached to sell now? or are they only to be found on the back shelves of libraries, and in the old homesteads which received them with eagerness and delight as they came out in editions of thou-sands? Nobody looked puzzled then if you spoke of J. G. Holland or of "Timothy Titcomb, " his pseudonym; they were names on every lip, not less celebrated than Cooper's, Dickens's, Thackeray's or Josh Billings's, and more familiar than Mark Twain's, for he had not yet persuaded us that it was necessary for us to laugh every time he poked us in the ribs. Very proper were the books which bore them, full of sugar-coated precepts, not unsuitable for Sunday reading, nor acid in their moralities, which did not hide the face of God in a mask of scowls, but revealed it in the smiles of genuine humour. In some ways they reflected the appearance of the author, a tall, distinguished, magisterial man of as much suavity as dignity, who took a parental interest in all the young people he met, so true indeed an interest in those who were nearest to him that he admitted them to all the advantages of partnership in the magazine he had founded, the first Scribner's Monthly, which is now the Century.

"But it is impossible to live by magazine work alone, my dear boy. There is not a man in America who is doing it, or who can do it. There are not enough magazines. We all have to depend on private means, or on the salary of some regular position. Go back to the Tribune or some other newspaper. Then you will be able to pay your way, and escape temptation, the horrors of debt, and all the misery of uncertainty, yes, and of destitution. They will wreck you, take my word for it, if you persist in your present intention."

He meant well, but I was foolhardy, and I did not shiver or throw up my hands under the cold water of his advice.

A young fellow, eager, slight, nervous, and endearing, with dark, deep, swimming eyes, sat on the other side of the desk and while he listened to his chief threw sympathetic glances at me. I never saw gentler eyes than those were: their glow was enveloping, it warmed by the courage and the inspiration it communicated. That was Richard Watson Gilder, the assistant editor, and as he saw me to the door he clasped my hand, and whispered, "Try us with something. I hope you will hit us right in the bull's-eye."

I did hit them in the bull's-eye almost immediately afterward and often again, if mere acceptance is to be reckoned as marksmanship, during all the years of my adventures as a "beach comber," not now of paragraphs and slender columns, but of serviceable material for magazines.

The flood of low-priced periodicals which now tides many a not quite seaworthy craft -- some privateers also - over the shallows, had not risen. Respectability in the Victorian sense of starch prevailed. We handled everything with kid gloves, though our coats might be shabby and our linen frayed, and we shaped our lips to "prunes," "prisms," and "propriety." We might be dull, but dulness was more excusable than vulgarity. We worked not with the axe on giant trees, making the splinters fly and our muscles bulge, but whittled and pared with pocket knives. Originality was not encouraged. The rake of the "muck-raker, " the language of the Bowery and the frontier, the stories flung out of a red heat, without thought of their consequences on domestic proprieties and on the sensibilities of polite society, stories scornful of syntax and orderliness of dress, did not profane the unsullied pages of those unsophisticated days. No doubt there were slimy places at our very doors, but we shut our eyes to them or hoodwinked them, and let the scavenger attend to them out of our sight and out of the reach of our nostrils.

"Not in the New York Ledger!"

When Robert Bonner once threw a story back to its author and was asked why he rejected it he replied, "Because cousins marry in it."

"But don't cousins marry in real life, Mr. Bonner?"

"That may be, but never in the New York Ledger."

That illustrates the primness which circumscribed us. Hardy, Wells, and Eden Phillpotts had not cleared the horizon. The off-hand colloquialism which began with Kipling and runs riot in his imitators was not permitted.

The standard which shackled us was that of a straight laced mother, who, having morality as the first consideration, becomes after that solicitous for a style of ambling ease, unimpeded by any complexities of thought or phrase which might delay the "instruction and the entertainment"— thus she combined the words — of the dear children.

My first article in Harper's was on "Jack Ashore." It exposed the wrongs of the most defenceless people in the world, but it could scarcely have been classed as "muck-raking."

How antiquated they look, those magazines of the early seventies with all their decorum, their sober articles on science and travel, and their funny little wood-engravings ! The cherubs who blow bubbles on the old cover of Harper's Monthly were already middle-aged and should have had some clothing to save the readers' blushes. The same editor sits now in the same chair in the same cubical that he occupied when I climbed the spiral stairway to the editorial rooms to see him then. He celebrated his seventieth birthday five years ago, and soon afterward he — Henry Mills Alden — wrote to me: "The world goes well with me -- better than I ever hoped. I could only wish for you or for any other friend, that his satisfaction with earthly life be as full as mine." A dreamer and a mystic, he would rather talk to you of metaphysics than of manuscripts; a born philosopher, diverted by the pressure of circumstances from the lore he preferred, he would for choice expound in a low voice the Eleusinian mysteries with his head wreathed in smoke from his pipe rather than hasten to dispel your mystery as to the fate of the contribution you had submitted to him last week or the week before. He was very patient with his young contributors, very eager for their success, and when he was compelled to hand a manuscript back to any of them I am sure it wrung him. He had been through the mill, and he told me of an experience he had had with Guernsey, his predecessor.

"Yes, we'll take it," Guernsey had said of a page-long poem which Alden had offered, and forthwith Guernsey had filled a voucher and passed it on to him. It was a thrifty, porridge-eating time in literature for both editors and authors, and though Alden had not expected much the figures on the voucher were smaller.

" Why, Alden, you look disappointed."

"I am — a little."

"What did you expect?"

"Well, I thought it might be worth ten dollars." The sum called for by the voucher was five.

"Very well; we want to be generous. We'll split the difference and make it seven fifty."

If a poem equal in merit to that were offered to him today, I venture to say Alden would pay at least fifty and perhaps a hundred for it. The wages of prose and verse have improved.

Faces and methods have changed, but I believe the old Harper building, like Alden's sanctum, is just the same now as it was then. Then the founders of the house were alive, a remarkable family of strong, whole-some, conservative, and efficient-looking men of a solid English type that has become almost, if not quite, extinct in the modern business world. A friend of mine who was associated with them for many years described to me the examination he passed when he applied for employment in a literary capacity. His testimonials having been scrutinized, he was questioned as to his habits.

"You smoke?"

"Very little."

" You drink ?"

"Only in moderation."

"You gamble?"

"Never."

"Come, come! Then what is your vice? Every man must have one. Out with it!"

Galahad himself would have been cornered in such an interrogation.

They were hospitable, too, in an old-fashioned way, and from the bustle of the publishing floor, stacked to the ceiling with books and papers, resonant under the wheels of trucks and the tramp of employees, they used to take their friends, customers, and favourite authors into an inner room of quiet luxury, decorated by the artists of their staff, and offer them the choice of various decanters.

Only malfeasance or inefficiency dislodged a man from his berth. The old cashier, Demorest, had been there time out of mind a gruff old fellow, who glared from behind his grille, and paid out money grudgingly, as though it were being thrown away. I took my vouchers to him in dread of that damning, transfixing glance of his, which implied that while literature might be all right as a manufactured product, the creatures who produced it were as leeches boring into the props and drawing the sap out of the foundations of the business.

When the amount called for was fifty dollars he made me feel that it was unconscionable; when it increased to a hundred he held the voucher at close range and distant, incredible at both, and examined it for what seemed to be an hour, examined it and re-examined it, screwing his eyes at me and it bitterly; and when, one happy and memorable day, the amount for a special service rose to two hundred dollars, his disapprobation overwhelmed both of us. He held the slip of paper first at arm's length, then brushed it against his nose; groaned, leaned back in his stool, slowly opened the receipt book and noisily closed it, and before he suspiciously handed out the money came from behind the grille and surveyed me from head to foot, snorting as he did so, with the effect of making me half believe that in some way "I had perpetrated a fraud. But it was better to risk that blood-hound of the treasury, growling and straining his leash, than to return down the iron stairway, ascended buoyantly, descended with heavy feet, a heavy heart, and pocket bulging with a rejected manuscript instead of dollars.

Those descents sometimes reminded me of a night-mare of my childhood. A Calvinistic nurse had pictured for me the place all bad boys go to. It was down a wide, dark stairway, and as you went deeper and deeper with trembling legs, wishing to run back but quite unable to do it, you grew warmer and warmer, hotter and hotter, until you were bathed in perspiration. Then a smell of sulphur stifled you, and the red reflections of an enormous fire stained the walls, the ceiling, and the steps you were treading on. A few steps more, and you, struggling and shrieking, reached the biggest kitchen you had ever seen, and a gleeful imp sprang at you and pushed you against the prongs of a fork held by a huge creature resembling a scarlet goat, who dropped you on a broiler and grilled you while the imp danced and laughed, until you were sure you were very much overdone. And he cooked you and cooked and cooked you as a real cook does a chop or a steak when she is talking to the grocer's boy or the policeman.

The same nurse once touched my bare finger with a lighted match, and begged me to remember how very painful flames all over the body must be if so slight a scorch as that could hurt so much. By this time, and by her own experience, she has probably proved, for weal or woe, her little experiment on me.

You could have counted on the fingers of one hand all the periodicals in New York that paid a living wage. They were Harper's, Scribner's Monthly, Appleton's Journal, Hearth and Home, and the Galaxy, which, unillustrated, was in a literary way the most brilliant of them all. I can praise the Galaxy, and my old friends, its editors, Colonel William Church and John Lillie, without fearing reproach or challenge, since I never burdened them with a line.

Appleton's was a neat, dignified small quarto, full of pleasant little essays, edited by Oliver Bell Bunce, the literary adviser of the publishers, to whom he suggested many highly successful books, among them "Picturesque America" and "Picturesque Europe," which, lying under the family Bible, or near it, still adorn, I suppose, not a few musty chromo-hung and horse-haired country parlours.

Your first meeting with him was likely to be as terrifying as the bark of Demorest. A lean, stooping, gray-visaged man, intellectual looking, spruce in attire, quick in movement, imperious in manner, he disconcerted you by the flash of his eyes, and then dashed your manuscript on the desk before him, flattening it with resounding blows of both hands if it were rolled, hunching his shoulders, and working his mouth as a dog does while he stiffens himself for an attack. But there was no bite to Bunce. All those menacing demonstrations were but a necessary defence against the impulses which, unguarded, would have embarrassed him through too many indiscretions of sympathy and generosity. He had the tenderest of hearts under that alarming demeanour, as you were likely to discover before even your first meeting with him ended.

I do not mean that he subsided into the purring sort of man, into blandishments and oily acquiescences. He was always positive and gesticulatory, full of affirmations and postulates, of views taken at a tangent and often taken merely to provoke discussion. Ile liked to argue on art and literature, starting invariably with an emphatic "I affirm," and what he affirmed was so different from the opinions of others that conversation with him never missed being breezy; sometimes it whirled in the vortex of a tempest.

Some of his affirmations were gathered in a book of his called "Bachelor Bluff." His language, whether spoken or written, was as vigorous and stimulating as his ideas were original. Frequently you might not agree with him, but you were never disinclined to listen to the dogmas and paradoxes he peppered you with from his rapid-fire battery. Like most of us, he had sup-pressed his ambitions, which had budded at the outset in a five-act tragedy, and losing his hold on the skirts of the classic mantle — what a slippery robe it is !— had resigned himself undaunted to the thorns of the editorial chair and the small satisfactions of the book-making. His greatest success, measured by circulation, was a little volume of "Don'ts," a manual of social and moral prohibitions, which had a vogue equal to that of "Helen's Babies" or "Wee Macgregor," and for a long time the title endured as a popular catchword, like Punch's "don't" to people about to marry. The trivialities of which we are not proud often enough please the public taste much better than our finer, loftier efforts.

Every Sunday evening he and Mrs. Bunce, assisted by their clever and pretty daughters, opened their house in Twenty-first Street for a late supper, and hither came artists and authors, big and little, those who had won their spurs, and those who were unmounted and uncommissioned. Young painters who had been forced to abandon their dreams of glorious canvases hung on the line at the Salon, for the sake of the bread and cheese procurable by illustrations, and young authors who, humbly paying their way by fifteen and twenty dollar articles on cabbages, chimney-sweeps, organ-grinders, and marionettes, had .in their heads the ferment of epics, novels, and plays, were as welcome in. that generous house as any of the celebrities who were constantly present. As I recall those boys and the sacrifice of their desires and perhaps of their natural abilities, a protest clamours for utterance. Oh, the inexorable "pressure of circumstances!" How it binds and suffocates ! How it retards, cripples, and humiliates the youth of the twin professions and makes artisans of them instead of artists !

If I mention some of the celebrities who were there, it is probable that their names will be meaningless and the reason of their distinction unperceived by readers under fifty. Who were the two Cary sisters? I may be asked. Who were Richard Henry Stoddard, Arthur Quartley, Swain Gifford, F. E. Church, Walter Shirlaw, Charles Warren Stoddard, Edgar Fawcett, Albert Falvey Webster, William Henry Bishop, and Frederick Dielman? Only a few like Stedman, Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, and E. A. Abbey are recalled without a dip into reference books; the front sheet of the roll is visible while it is held in place by a clasp; those below have sprung back out of sight and it is a dusty job to haul them down again.

I, like cleverer men, yielded to that irresistible pressure. Could I have chosen I would have given all my time to the writing of stories, novels, and plays, to purely literary effort, but I was in need of immediate returns. The fiction of a beginner is always a speculative and hazardous offering in the market; I could not do without an assured income. The cost of my ransom from the dragon was the renunciation of the imagination, except as a game of solitaire in leisure hours, in hours stolen from sleep. What I had learned during my apprentice-ship under Mr. Bowles and in the Tribune office now put me on my feet. I had acquired the journalistic knack of writing evenly, discreetly, and without slopping over; of cutting and fitting to measurements like a carpenter, a tailor, or a shoemaker; of always being passable, in a workman-like way, if nothing more. I could be trusted with commissions. All I had to do was to find subjects which the editors approved of, and no questions followed as to my ability to turn out the given number of words — five thousand or six thousand — with the "neatness and despatch" appealing from shop windows. I was fertile in subjects, and that was as important to success as the precision and the simplicity of style which I fell into. The ability to dovetail words and sentences in lucid paragraphs and pages is not enough in itself. You must also be able to hit on topics which your editor has not already done, which accord with his policy, which he believes will suit his public. He counts on you for that, and I think it is a natural gift, an individual instinct, one of the few things which cannot be taught or learned.

Many years later when I had become an editor I proposed a subject to Sir Edwin Arnold which I confessed to him seemed to be out of his line, and as he accepted it he sighed, "I am ashamed to say that after all my years in the office of the Daily Telegraph I can write on any subject offered to me."

My own range, not so universal as his, nor exploited with his erudition or depicted with his vividness, comprised a superficial area absurdly disproportionate to the depth of its shallow soil. It covered town and country, slums and the resorts of fashion, art and industry, the sea and navies, attics and housetops, the medical profession, and cowboys; it extended from the Atlantic to the .Pacific, for much of it was topographical: an isthmus of it opened a way to England and the Continent. While I was in. the midst of it Richard Henry Stoddard, finer as a poet than judicious as a critic, playfully dubbed me the "Briareus of the Press" the Titan of the fifty heads and the hundred hands. If he meant that, it was a far-fetched compliment. Though it smeared the lips with honey, it recalled the sting of Tennyson's fling at Bulwer Lytton. Not an interesting monstrosity like Briareus, I was but a filler of bottles from a tap of constant supply.

All the while cravings for higher things were murmuring and beating against the bars of the cage, and sometimes they got half way out into the sunlight and struggled to be free. Imagination rebels against renunciation; you may renounce it, but it will not abide by any contract you make for it. Why repine? "Who hath despised the day of small things?" The freedom of the woods offers no shelter from the hardships of the weather, and dreams may lose their charm if they are transmuted into actualities; they are not meant for earth, and substantiated they may be as difficult as an angel would find her wings every time she was asked to "step lively," or "move up in front," in an overcrowded street car.

The pleasantest incidents in the work were the journeys made in company with the illustrators of the articles — with E. A. Abbey, C. S. Reinhart, Howard Pyle, Granville Perkins, E. H. Garrett, and Harry Fenn. We were light-hearted boys then, and while our spirits were high enough under ordinary circumstances, any mishap or particular hardship, hunger, fatigue, the loss of sleep, or strange bedfellows at once raised them. Everybody predicted fame for Abbey, for he had already shown his genius in his illustrations of "The Quiet Life" and "Old Songs." Rumour sparkled in his dark eyes; he scorned convention. There was something elfish in him. You might be walking and talking with him., the "Ab," of those days, and suddenly to your amazement and the amazement of any one else in sight, he would drop you to dance a double shuffle in the middle of the road, with all the confident flourishes of a stage darkey. And when he has been amused I have seen him roll off his feet in uncontrollable laughter, and bury his head in the cushions of a chair or sofa, while his plump little 'body rocked and heaved. A Royal Academician now, he was authorized to paint the picture of the coronation of King Edward, who, like Queen Alexandra, became one of his admirers. As the sittings progressed, the King praised this and that, and seemed to be particularly pleased with the conspicuousness of one of his royal legs among all the details of that gorgeous pageant. The other leg was hidden by his robes and the robes of prelates and peers.

"Splendid, Abbey!" said His Majesty, "and do you know? I think you had better show both legs. Then it will be perfect."

Who could have been so churlish as to flout the wish of so amiable a monarch as King Edward? Not Abbey, and though that apparently trifling change involved many others, he, of course, consented.

A city's water front abounds with material for pictures and descriptions, and I had often been attracted by the mixture of domestic life and commerce to be observed among the fleets of canal boats moored at Whitehall. Abbey and I decided on a trip in one of them, and spent two weeks in her, gliding up the Hudson and through the canal in the most restful and beguiling way. She was unprepared for passengers, but, fully content, we shared the hutch of her captain and his daughter — a very nice girl, by the way — under the tiller, and broke the journey and picked strawberries at their home, a comfortable, prosperous farm house on the very banks of the canal at Oneida. Afterward the Tile Club fol-lowed our example, and received the credit for the revival of an outgrown means of transit which properly belonged to us.

The "canallers " are better than the reputation they have with those who do not know them. Their boats are often their only homes, and their families are born and reared in them. A boat comes along with a hard-worked woman in a rocking-chair at the stern, a wild lily in a tumbler of water on a common box, which serves as a work table; and, in an enclosure of rope and wood, like a sheep pen, on the cabin roof, children are playing, and we see a young woman pressing a tame robin to her breast, and feeding it at the end of her finger. Hour after hour we glide as if through air, with less perceptible motion than even the flutter of wings, and all the beauty of the valley of the Mohawk is silently opened before us. As the stars gleam out, myriads of fireflies emulate them, and flash across the oily surface of the stream. Each boat carries a brilliant lantern in the bow, which disperses a circle of yellow light on the watery track ahead. The tow-lines dip occasionally with a musical thrill, and you hear the steady thud of the horses' hoofs on the ground, or the low cry of the driver as he urges them forward. At the stern the helms-man sings till a lock engages him. His voice then deep-ens. "Lock be-l-o-o-w!" he calls to his mate; "ste-a-dy, ste-a-dy!" to the driver. There is a momentary clatter of feet upon the deck; we rise smoothly to the new level; the lock lights fade; and we are travelling softly toward the amber morning.

Howard Pyle and I drove over the old national pike from Frederick, Maryland, to West Virginia, which a century ago was the great highway of coaches, wagons, and horsemen between the East and West. It was the route of Jackson, Clay, Harrison, Taylor, Polk, Calhoun, Davy Crockett, and other celebrities, to Baltimore and Washington. An octogenarian told us that he had seen Clay thrown from a coach into a heap of soft limestone near the Pennsylvania border. Clay was very witty and very courteous. "He bowed to everybody who bowed to him." As soon as he recovered from the shock he relighted his cigar, and smiled. "This, gentlemen," he said, bowing to the onlookers, "is indeed a case of mixing the Clay of Kentucky with the lime-stone of Pennsylvania."

There were sixteen gayly painted coaches each way a day; the cattle and sheep were never out of sight; the canvas-covered wagons were drawn by six or twelve horses with bows of bells over their collars; some families went by in private vehicles; and while most of the travellers were unostentatious, a few had splendid equipages, and employed outriders. Some of the passes through the Alleghanies are nearly as precipitous as the Sierra Nevada. Within a mile of the road the country was a wilderness.

When Pyle and I drove over the pike thirty-three years ago blacksnakes, moccasins, and copperheads had grown so unused to the sight of man that they lay in the sun unconcerned while we passed. The old taverns were crumbling, the old villages around the taverns were asleep. The pervading scent of pines seems to still cling to my clothes, and I remember the voices of whip-poor-wills, owls, and catamounts which shivered through the air as night fell in purple and gold upon the endless ridges and peaks of the Alleghanies, and sank the gorges into unfathomable pits, one of which is called the Shades of Death. I remember, too, the pretty maid at the old toll-house, who had no change for the coin we gave her, and who went calling across the pasture, "Oh, mother ! Oh, mother!" so loudly that all the mountains picked it up and bleated, "Oh, mother! Oh, mother!" as from a nursery swarming with infant Titans.

The fee I received for one of those outings was less than I had looked for, but the editor did not offer, as in Alden's case, to "split the difference" between my expectations and his estimate of value. All he said was, "Why, after all that pleasure we ought not to pay you anything. You ought to pay us for giving you such an opportunity." I did not see it in that way then, but could I repeat those journeys in the same company and in the same joyous spirits, I would not hesitate to put my hand into my pocket as deeply and as readily as it would go.

At the end of ten years of free-lancing I had over-stocked the market, the inevitable consequence which Doctor Holland had foreseen when there was only one periodical to every twelve or more which exist now. Harper's had accepted between forty and fifty long articles of mine, and Scribner's Monthly and the Century nearly as many. Some months I had taken the leading place in four magazines at once, and yet with all my industry and versatility — I can claim those merits — I had not been able at the best to make more than between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars in any one year. What was I to do now? I did not care to return to daily journalism. The "pressure of circumstances " was tightening on me again. I was glumly smoking and wool-gathering on a raw, gray February morning in lodgings opposite the Astor Library — in one of those austere, granite, colonnaded houses under the porticoes of which the ancient stoics might have gathered in the intangible armour of their philosophy. The fire in the grate would not burn, sleet and snow were strumming against the windows. Nothing would go. It was a morning of restlessness, perplexities, and forebodings. I picked up books, letters, and papers, glanced at them and dropped them. Then a stranger knocked at my door.

This may sound like the slow music of a melodrama; it may look like a stage scene carefully devised for its effect on the reader's sentiment. Every detail is true, except that before knocking on my door the stranger had sent up his card, which bore a name I did not know. It was Providence personified in a well-dressed, polite young man from Boston.

Providence has many disguises, and is often belated, but how often in life she steps in at the eleventh hour and saves the situation by providing bread for the starving and a rescuing hand for the drowning! Every resource is at an end, and we resign ourselves to fate; not a crumb remains and hardly a breath; the fifty-eighth minute is on the edge of the fifty-ninth; the curtain is shutting down on the last ray of light, when this angel of compassion appears and restores us. I think that those of us who have endured the stings and arrows of misfortune, in the tight and bristling corners some of us know, can all recall some moment of crisis when the strangling hag of despair has had us at our last gasp, and Providence has intervened with saving grace, and left us in such bewilderment over our salvation that we have not had a voice to thank her, nor fully comprehended the miracle until it has loomed in retrospect from the distance of years.

"Would I come on to Boston and see Mr. Ford?" That was what the messenger said. I had been a contributor to the Youth's Companion since my seventeenth year, and already knew Mr. Ford well, a man of the kindliest nature and the highest principles. He had acquired the Companion while it was a very small and very restricted thing, and was making it by leaps and bounds what it has been ever since — an educative power over children and adults in American families. When I had submitted my boyish essays to him he had read them in the most obliging way, while I waited. I used to watch his hands anxiously as he read. If, as he neared the last sheet, he passed the manuscript from right to left I knew it was to be accepted, for then the right would reach into his waistcoat pocket and fetch out five dollars for me.

Within twenty-four hours of that knock on my door I went to Boston and became a member of his staff, beginning at once the service which has lasted thirty years, and which I hope has been as useful to the proprietors as it has been pleasant to me.

A few years later I met Allan Thorndike Rice, who had recently bought the North American Review for a song. A man of means, birth, culture, and high ambition, he had happened to call, by chance, on the late James R. Osgood, who was publishing the Review in Boston.

"Why don't you buy it?" Osgood had said to him, jokingly as he thought, when Rice spoke of his literary aspirations.

"The Review? Is the Review for sale? Let me think it over."

"There's no time to think it over. We shall not issue another number. Unless you take hold to-day it will expire to-morrow."

For a few thousand dollars Mr. Rice had purchased it and, investing a part of his ample wealth in it, had resuscitated it with brilliant results. He was new at editorship, but adaptable and fertile in ideas, and intimate with many distinguished people, statesmen diplomats, and others, who were serviceable to him. Lawrence Oliphant, whose talents verged on genius, also lent a hand in writing for him and in procuring foreign contributors. There are not many stories in literature sadder or less explicable than poor Oliphant's. He was well connected, a gentleman and a scholar, a favourite in society, whose books, like his conversation, sparkled with wit and dewy freshness "Altiora Peto," for example. An idealist, too, and soon afterward, to everybody's amazement, he fell under the thrall of a religio-socialistic experiment in California; burned all his ships behind him; surrendered his identity and what property he had to the phalanstery; ceased to communicate with his former friends, and was seen peddling fruit in San Francisco.

Allan Thorndike Rice also was an unusually fascinating man to those for whom he cared, very handsome, intellectual, and genial and confiding, if he were drawn to you.

I called on him in a dudgeon to see why he had not answered a letter of mine, sent weeks before in which I had proposed an article for the Review. He received me with so much apologetic cordiality that my pique at his previous dilatoriness disappeared in the instant.

"Of course I want that article. How soon can you let me have it?" he said, adding, "And I want you."

That was another surprise, and we talked it over at one of the luncheons he was always giving at Delmonico's. He had just been appointed minister extraordinary and envoy plenipotentiary to St. Petersburg, and he made a contract with me to take editorial charge of the Review during his absence, subject, of course, to his direction and supervision from that difficult distance, and without breaking or modifying my entirely agreeable relations with Mr. Ford, in Boston. All his preparations were made; final instructions were given; he left the office with me one evening and after we had dined together he said in his kindly way, as we parted: "You look tired. Go to bed early Here is a prescription for something my doctor gave me which will make you sleep."

He never returned to the office. A day or two before the day fixed for his departure he died in the prime of life at the very threshold of a career which, had he not been cut off so ruthlessly and unnecessarily, would undoubtedly have carried him to enduring eminence.

The property passed to his friend, Lloyd Bryce, and under him I served the Review for eight years, most of the time as managing editor, and, toward the close, when my double burden was breaking me down, as associate editor. I shrink from boasting, and, like many another editor, I have always been content to work be-hind a screen, but some of the things I achieved for the Review are of more than personal interest, as, for example, the discussion I arranged between Mr. Glad-stone, Cardinal Manning, and Robert Ingersoll on the subject of Faith, and the later controversy on Home Rule in which I entangled, not without a little strategy and perhaps I ought to be ashamed of it — Mr. Glad-stone, while he was prime minister, with Mr. Balfour, the late Duke of Argyll, and other foemen worthy of his steel. Of those tournaments I may give fuller detail farther on.