The Beverley printer suggested that my Warwick Lane serial should combine, as far as my powers allowed, the human interest and genial humour of Dickens with the plot-weaving of G. W. R. Reynolds; and, furnished with these broad instructions, I filled my ink bottle, spread out my foolscap, and, on a hopelessly wet afternoon, began my first novel—­now known as “The Trail of the Serpent”—­but published in Warwick Lane, and later in the stirring High Street of Beverley, as “Three Times Dead.”  In “Three Times Dead” I gave loose to all my leanings to the violent in melodrama.  Death stalked in ghastliest form across my pages; and villainy reigned triumphant till the Nemesis of the last chapter.  I wrote with all the freedom of one who feared not the face of a critic; and, indeed, thanks to the obscurity of its original production, and its re-issue as the ordinary two-shilling railway novel, this first novel of mine has almost entirely escaped the critical lash, and has pursued its way as a chartered libertine.  People buy it and read it, and its faults and follies are forgiven as the exuberances of a pen unchastened by experience; but faster and more facile at that initial stage than it ever became after long practice.

[Illustration:  THE SMOKING-ROOM.]

I dashed headlong at my work, conjured up my images of horror or of mirth, and boldly built the framework of my story, and set my puppets moving.  To me, at least, they were living creatures, who seemed to follow impulses of their own, to be impelled by their own passions, to love and hate, and plot and scheme of their own accord.  There was unalloyed pleasure in the composition of that first story, and the knowledge that it was to be actually printed and published, and not to be declined with thanks by adamantine magazine editors, like a certain short story which I had lately written, and which contained the germ of “Lady Audley’s Secret.”  Indeed, at this period of my life, the postman’s knock had become associated in my mind with the sharp sound of a rejected MS. dropping through the open letter-box on to the floor of the hall, while my heart seemed to drop in sympathy with that book-post packet.

[Illustration:  THE LIBRARY.]

Short of never being printed at all, my Beverley-born novel could have hardly entered upon the world of books in a more profound obscurity.  That one living creature ever bought a number of “Three Times Dead” I greatly doubt.  I can recall the thrill of emotion with which I tore open the envelope that contained my complimentary copy of the first number, folded across, and in aspect inferior to a gratis pamphlet about a patent medicine.  The miserable little wood block which illustrated that first number would have disgraced a baker’s whitey-brown bag, would have been unworthy to illustrate a penny bun.  My spirits were certainly dashed at the technical shortcomings of that first serial, and I was hardly surprised when I was informed a few weeks later, that