guided himself by that.  Three days, at white heat, completed his narrative; but when he had copied it carefully, in a large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a rhetoric he picked up in the library that there were such things as paragraphs and quotation marks.  He had never thought of such things before; and he promptly set to work writing the article over, referring continually to the pages of the rhetoric and learning more in a day about composition than the average schoolboy in a year.  When he had copied the article a second time and rolled it up carefully, he read in a newspaper an item on hints to beginners, and discovered the iron law that manuscripts should never be rolled and that they should be written on one side of the paper.  He had violated the law on both counts.  Also, he learned from the item that first-class papers paid a minimum of ten dollars a column.  So, while he copied the manuscript a third time, he consoled himself by multiplying ten columns by ten dollars.  The product was always the same, one hundred dollars, and he decided that that was better than seafaring.  If it hadn’t been for his blunders, he would have finished the article in three days.  One hundred dollars in three days!  It would have taken him three months and longer on the sea to earn a similar amount.  A man was a fool to go to sea when he could write, he concluded, though the money in itself meant nothing to him.  Its value was in the liberty it would get him, the presentable garments it would buy him, all of which would bring him nearer, swiftly nearer, to the slender, pale girl who had turned his life back upon itself and given him inspiration.

He mailed the manuscript in a flat envelope, and addressed it to the editor of the San Francisco Examiner.  He had an idea that anything accepted by a paper was published immediately, and as he had sent the manuscript in on Friday he expected it to come out on the following Sunday.  He conceived that it would be fine to let that event apprise Ruth of his return.  Then, Sunday afternoon, he would call and see her.  In the meantime he was occupied by another idea, which he prided himself upon as being a particularly sane, careful, and modest idea.  He would write an adventure story for boys and sell it to The Youth’s Companion.  He went to the free reading-room and looked through the files of The Youth’s Companion.  Serial stories, he found, were usually published in that weekly in five instalments of about three thousand words each.  He discovered several serials that ran to seven instalments, and decided to write one of that length.

He had been on a whaling voyage in the Arctic, once—­a voyage that was to have been for three years and which had terminated in shipwreck at the end of six months.  While his imagination was fanciful, even fantastic at times, he had a basic love of reality that compelled him to write about the things he knew.  He knew whaling, and out of the real materials of his knowledge he proceeded to manufacture the fictitious adventures of the two boys he intended to use as joint heroes.  It was easy work, he decided on Saturday evening.  He had completed on that day the first instalment of three thousand words—­much to the amusement of Jim, and to the open derision of Mr. Higginbotham, who sneered throughout meal-time at the “litery” person they had discovered in the family.