My first story was based on those fairy tales which first opened to me the world of imaginative literature.  My first attempt in fiction, and in round-hand, on carefully pencilled double lines, was a story of two sisters, a good sister and a wicked, and I fear adhered more faithfully to the lines of the archetypal story than the writer’s pen kept to the double fence which should have ensured neatness.

[Illustration:  The hall.]

The interval between the ages of eight and twelve was a prolific period, fertile in unfinished MSS., among which I can now trace a historical novel on the Siege of Calais—­an Eastern story, suggested by a passionate love of Miss Pardoe’s Turkish tales, and Byron’s “Bride of Abydos,” which my mother, a devoted Byron worshipper, allowed me to read aloud to her—­and doubtless murder in the reading—­a story of the Hartz Mountains, with audacious flights in German diablerie; and lastly, very seriously undertaken, and very perseveringly worked upon, a domestic story, the outline of which was suggested by the same dear and sympathetic mother.

Now it is a curious fact, which may or may not be common to other story-spinners, that I have never been able to take kindly to a plot—­or the suggestion of a plot—­offered to me by anybody else.  The moment a friend tells me that he or she is desirous of imparting a series of facts—­strictly true—­as if truth in fiction mattered one jot!—­which in his or her opinion would make the ground plan of an admirable, startling, and altogether original three-volume novel, I know in advance that my imagination will never grapple with those startling circumstances—­that my thoughts will begin to wander before my friend has got half through the remarkable chain of events, and that if the obliging purveyor of romantic incidents were to examine me at the end of the story, I should be spun ignominiously.  For the most part, such subjects as have been proposed to me by friends have been hopelessly unfit for the circulating library; or, where not immoral, have been utterly dull; but it is, I believe, a fixed idea in the novel-reader’s mind that any combination of events out of the beaten way of life will make an admirable subject for the novelist’s art.

[Illustration:  The Staircase.]

My dear mother, taking into consideration my tender years, and perhaps influenced in somewise by her own love of picking up odd bits of Sheraton or Chippendale furniture in the storehouses of the less ambitious second-hand dealers of those simpler days, offered me the following scenario for a domestic story.  It was an incident which, I doubt not, she had often read at the tail of a newspaper column, and which certainly savours of the gigantic gooseberry, the sea-serpent, and the agricultural labourer who unexpectedly inherits half-a-million.  It was eminently a Simple Story, and far more worthy of that title than Mrs. Inchbald’s long and involved romance.