of iron could have held himself down, as Martin did, day after day, to nineteen consecutive hours of toil.  He never lost a moment.  On the looking-glass were lists of definitions and pronunciations; when shaving, or dressing, or combing his hair, he conned these lists over.  Similar lists were on the wall over the oil-stove, and they were similarly conned while he was engaged in cooking or in washing the dishes.  New lists continually displaced the old ones.  Every strange or partly familiar word encountered in his reading was immediately jotted down, and later, when a sufficient number had been accumulated, were typed and pinned to the wall or looking-glass.  He even carried them in his pockets, and reviewed them at odd moments on the street, or while waiting in butcher shop or grocery to be served.

He went farther in the matter.  Reading the works of men who had arrived, he noted every result achieved by them, and worked out the tricks by which they had been achieved—­the tricks of narrative, of exposition, of style, the points of view, the contrasts, the epigrams; and of all these he made lists for study.  He did not ape.  He sought principles.  He drew up lists of effective and fetching mannerisms, till out of many such, culled from many writers, he was able to induce the general principle of mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast about for new and original ones of his own, and to weigh and measure and appraise them properly.  In similar manner he collected lists of strong phrases, the phrases of living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame, or that glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of the arid desert of common speech.  He sought always for the principle that lay behind and beneath.  He wanted to know how the thing was done; after that he could do it for himself.  He was not content with the fair face of beauty.  He dissected beauty in his crowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking smells alternated with the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having dissected and learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to create beauty itself.

He was so made that he could work only with understanding.  He could not work blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was producing and trusting to chance and the star of his genius that the effect produced should be right and fine.  He had no patience with chance effects.  He wanted to know why and how.  His was deliberate creative genius, and, before he began a story or poem, the thing itself was already alive in his brain, with the end in sight and the means of realizing that end in his conscious possession.  Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure.  On the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood all tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and incommunicable connotations.  Before such he bowed down and marvelled,