“Oh, you still go on with the novel?”

“It’s done, man, finished—­perfect.”

“All written out?”

“Not a word of it.  That isn’t the way people write books now; no, I have clipped out half of it with a pair of scissors, and the half is all marked with pencil.”

“But the authors will find you out.”

“Not a bit of it.  No author reads any body’s writings but his own; or if they do, I’ll deny it—­that’s all; and the public will only think the poor fellow prodigiously vain, to believe that any one would quote his book.  And, besides, here are the reviews?”

“Of the book that isn’t published?”

“To be sure.  Here are two or three sentences from Macauley’s ‘Milton,’ half a page from Wilson’s ‘Wordsworth,’ and a good lump from Jeffrey’s ‘Walter Scott.’  Between them, they made out my book to be a very fine thing, I assure you.  I sha’n’t sell it under five hundred pounds.”

“Do you give your name?”

“Certainly not—­unless I were a lord.  No.  I think I shall pass for a woman:  a young girl, perhaps; daughter of a bishop; or the divorced wife of a member of parliament.”

“I should like to hear some of your work.  I am interested.”

“I know you are.  We have a bet, you know; but I have found out a strange thing in correcting my novel—­that you can make a whole story out of any five chapters.”

“No, no.  You’re quizzing.”

“Not I. I tell you, out of any five chapters, of any five novels, you make a very good short tale; and the odd thing is, it doesn’t the least matter which chapters you choose.  With a very little sagacity, the reader sees the whole; and, let me tell you, the great fault of story-writing is telling too much, and leaving too little for the reader to supply to himself.  Recollect what I told you about altering the names of all the characters, and, with that single proviso, read chapter fifteen of the first volume of this——­”

Jack handed me a volume, turned down at the two-hundredth page, and I read what he told me to call the first chapter of “Love and Glory.”

THE WILDERNESS.

    “A tangled thicket is a holy place
    For contemplation lifting to the stars
    Its passionate eyes, and breathing paradise
    Within a sanctified solemnity.”

Old Play

["That’s my own,” said Jack.  “When people see that I don’t even quote a motto, they’ll think me a real original.  Go on.”]

The sun’s western rays were gilding the windows of the blue velvet drawing-room of Lorrington Castle, and the three ladies sat in silence, as if admiring the glorious light which now sank gradually behind the forest at the extremity of the park.  The lady Alice leant her cheek upon her hand, and before her rose a vision the agitating occurrences of yesterday.  The first declaration a girl receives alters her whole character for life.  No longer a solitary being, she