It was not long before I wearied of journalism; the daily article soon grows monotonous, even when you know it will be printed, and this I did not know; my prose was very faulty, and my ideas were unsettled, I could not go to the tap and draw them off, the liquor was still fermenting; and partly because my articles were not very easily disposed of, and partly because I was weary of writing on different subjects, I turned my attention to short stories.  I wrote a dozen with a view to preparing myself for a long novel.  Some were printed in weekly newspapers, others were returned to me from the magazines.  But there was a publisher in the neighbourhood of the Strand, who used to frequent a certain bar.  I saw the chance, and I seized it.  This worthy man conducted his business as he dressed himself, sloppily; a dear kind soul, quite witless and quite h-less.  From long habit he would make a feeble attempt to drive a bargain, but he generally let himself in:  he was, in a word, a literary stepping-stone.  Hundreds had made use of him.  If a fashionable author asked two hundred pounds for a book out of which he would be certain to make three, it was ten to one that he would allow the chance to drift away from him; but after having refused a dozen times the work of a Strand loafer whom he was in the habit of “treating,” he would say, “Send it in, my boy, send it in, I’ll see what can be done with it.”  There was a long counter, and the way to be published by Mr. B. was to straddle on the counter and play with a black cat.  There was an Irishman behind this counter who, for three pounds a week, edited the magazine, read the MS., looked after the printer and binder, kept the accounts when he had a spare moment, and entertained the visitors.  I did not trouble Messrs. Macmillan and Messrs. Longman with polite requests to look at my MS., but straddled on the counter, played with the cat, joked with the Irishman, was treated by Mr. B., and in the natural order of things my stories went into the magazine, and were paid for.  Strange were the ways of this office; Shakespeare might have sent in prose and poetry, but he would have gone into the wastepaper basket had he not previously straddled.  For those who were in the swim this was a matter of congratulation; straddling, we would cry, “We want no blooming outsiders coming along interfering with our magazine.  And you, Smith, you devil, you had a twenty-page story in last month and cut me out.  O’Flanagan, do you mind if I send you in a couple of poems as well as my regular stuff, that will make it all square?” “I’ll try to manage it; here’s the governor.”  And looking exactly like the unfortunate Mr. Sedley, Mr. B. used to slouch along, and he would fall into his leather armchair, the one in which he wrote the cheques.  The last time I saw that chair it was standing in the street, alas! in the hands of the brokers.