I had no trouble with the title though—­“Lichens.”  I have wondered the thing was never used before.  Lichens, variegated, beautiful, though on the most arid foundations, half fungoid, half vernal—­the very name for a booklet of modern verse.  And that, of course, decided the key of the cover and disposed of three or four pages.  A fly-leaf, a leaf with “Lichens” printed fair and beautiful a little to the left of the centre, then a title-page—­“Lichens.  By H.G.  Wells.  London:  MDCCCXCV.  Stephen Llewellyn.”  Then a restful blank page, and then—­the Dedication.  It was the dedication stopped me.  The title-page, it is true, had some points of difficulty.  Should the Christian name be printed in full or not, for instance; but it had none of the fatal fascination of the dedicatory page.  I had, so to speak, to look abroad among the ranks of men, and make one of those fretful forgotten millions—­immortal.  It seemed a congenial task.

I went to work forthwith.

It was only this morning that I realised the magnitude of my accumulations.  Ever since then—­it was three months ago—­I have been elaborating this Dedication.  I turned the pile over, idly at first.  Presently I became interested in tracing my varying moods, as they had found a record in the heap.

This struck me—­

[Illustration:  A Handwritten dedication, “To my Dearest Friend” followed by three successive names, two crossed out, then the whole dedication struck out]

Then again, a little essay in gratitude came to hand—­

TO
PROFESSOR AUGUSTUS FLOOD,
Whose Admirable Lectures on
Palaeontology
First turned my Attention to
Literature.

There was a tinge of pleasantry in the latter that pleased me very greatly when I wrote it, and I find immediately overlying it another essay in the same line—­

To the Latter-day Reviewer,
These Pearls.

For some days I was smitten with the idea of dedicating my little booklet to one of my numerous personal antagonists, and conveying some subtly devised insult with an air of magnanimity.  I thought, for instance, of Blizzard—­

SIR JOSEPH BLIZZARD,
The most distinguished, if not the greatest, of contemporary
anatomists.

I think it was “X.L.’s” book, Aut Diabolus aut Nihil, that set me upon another line.  There is, after all, your reader to consider in these matters, your average middle-class person to impress in some way.  They say the creature is a snob, and absolutely devoid of any tinge of humour, and I must confess that I more than half believe it.  At anyrate, it was that persuasion inspired—­

To the Countess of X.,
In Memory of Many Happy Days.

I know no Countess of X., as a matter of fact, but if the public is such an ass as to think better of my work for the suspicion, I do not care how soon I incur it.  And this again is a pretty utilisation of the waste desert of politics—­