availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while on the platform opposition makes me speak my best.  So I slid into marriage blindly and stupidly, fearing to give pain; fretted my heart out for a year; then, roused by harshness and injustice, stiffened and hardened, and lived with a wall of ice round me within which I waged mental conflicts that nearly killed me; and learned at last how to live and work in armour that turned the edge of the weapons that struck it, and left the flesh beneath unwounded, armour laid aside, but in the presence of a very few.

My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, “The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.”  For the sake of the unecclesiastically trained it may be as well to mention that in the Calendar of the Church of England there are a number of Saints’ Days; some of these are printed in red, and are Red Letter Days, for which services are appointed by the Church; others are printed in black, and are Black Letter Days, and have no special services fixed for them.  It seemed to me that it would be interesting to take each of these days and write a sketch of the life of the saint belonging to it, and accordingly I set to work to do so, and gathered various books of history and legend where-from to collect my “facts.”  I do not in the least know what became of that valuable book; I tried Macmillans with it, and it was sent on by them to some one who was preparing a series of Church books for the young; later I had a letter from a Church brotherhood offering to publish it, if I would give it as “an act of piety” to their order; its ultimate fate is to me unknown.

The short stories were more fortunate.  I sent the first to the Family Herald, and some weeks afterwards received a letter from which dropped a cheque as I opened it.  Dear me!  I have earned a good deal of money since by my pen, but never any that gave me the intense delight of that first thirty shillings.  It was the first money I had ever earned, and the pride of the earning was added to the pride of authorship.  In my childish delight and practical religion, I went down on my knees and thanked God for sending it to me, and I saw myself earning heaps of golden guineas, and becoming quite a support of the household.  Besides, it was “my very own,” I thought, and a delightful sense of independence came over me.  I had not then realised the beauty of the English law, and the dignified position in which it placed the married woman; I did not understand that all a married woman earned by law belonged to her owner, and that she could have nothing that belonged to her of right.[1] I did not want the money:  I was only so glad to have something of my own to give, and it was rather a shock to learn that it was not really mine at all.