I heard Mrs. Hopper open the hall-door, caught a glimpse of her looking out at us with satisfaction on her face, warm from the kitchen fire, and heard her close it, with much elaboration, and, tip-toe heavily away.

“Yes, this is my first book,” he went on, as though we had not paused.  “Of course I have had experience in writing before, magazine sketches, and that sort of thing, and beside that, I once had a mania for newspaper work, and much to my mother’s horror, I was really a reporter on one of the city papers—­The Earth.”

“Circulation guaranteed over 380,000,” I continued, rather ashamed of my flippancy, although he laughed.

“Exactly.  Well, after a time I had an offer to go on the editorial staff of the Eon, through a friend who has influence with the management, and it was just then I was taken ill with this typhoid fever that has left me the wreck you see,” he said, with a whimsically sad smile.  “That is not the worst, though,” he went on, a shadow falling over his upturned face, “I cannot explain it, although my doctor pretends to.  I had written—­oh! say half-a-dozen chapters of this book before my sickness.  As soon as I began to be convalescent, I wanted to amuse myself by going on with it.  I had my plot roughly blocked out, my characters were entirely distinct in my mind, yet when I took up my pen again, I found I could not write connectedly.  It was simply horrible.  I shall never forget that day.  Of course I imagined I should never write again.  I sent for two or three doctors, announced that I had paresis, and was told that it was madness for a man who had been as ill as I to attempt any sort of literary work for weeks, if not months.  But the sense that I absolutely could not write preyed upon me.  I used to do a little each day in spite of their orders, but it is only now that I am beginning to feel the confusion of ideas lessening, and the ability to present them coherently growing Even yet I only write disconnected parts of the chapters I had planned.  It is—­oh! what is that pet word of phrenologists? continuity, that I have not at my command.  I suppose you cannot quite understand the agony of such an experience, never having gone through it.  Only yesterday I tore up thirty pages of manuscript, and had more than half a mind to burn the whole thing.  It is only the consideration of the possibly great loss to the literary world that withholds me, you know,” he said with a half bitter laugh, throwing down the ruins of the flowers he had pulled to pieces with his thin, nervous hands, and rising.

“But I’ve been an unconscionable bore, even for a valetudinarian, and I believe they are privileged to tax people’s amiability.  I hope I havn’t tired you so that you will forbid my coming again.  I will promise not to talk about myself next time,” he said, as he turned to go down the path.