Her appeals had their effect.  A number of papers were very soon sent in; some with names, some anonymously.  She looked these papers over, and marked those which she thought would be worth reading and listening to at the meetings.  One of them has just been presented to the reader.  As to the authorship of the following one there were many conjectures.  A well-known writer, who had spent some weeks at Arrowhead Village, was generally suspected of being its author.  Some, however, questioned whether it was not the work of a new hand, who wrote, not from experience, but from his or her ideas of the condition to which a story-teller, a novelist, must in all probability be sooner or later reduced.  The reader must judge for himself whether this first paper is the work of an old hand or a novice.

        Someexperiences of A novelist.

“I have written a frightful number of stories, forty or more, I think.  Let me see.  For twelve years two novels a year regularly:  that makes twenty-four.  In three different years I have written three stories annually:  that makes thirty-three.  In five years one a year,—­thirty-eight.  That is all, is n’t it?  Yes.  Thirty-eight, not forty.  I wish I could make them all into one composite story, as Mr. Galton does his faces.

“Hero—­heroine—­mamma—­papa—­uncle—­sister, and so on.  Love —­obstacles—­misery—­tears—­despair—­glimmer of hope—­unexpected solution of difficulties—­happy finale.

“Landscape for background according to season.  Plants of each month got up from botanical calendars.

“I should like much to see the composite novel.  Why not apply Mr. Galton’s process, and get thirty-eight stories all in one?  All the Yankees would resolve into one Yankee, all the P——­West Britons into one Patrick, etc., what a saving of time it would be!

“I got along pretty well with my first few stories.  I had some characters around me which, a little disguised, answered well enough.  There was the minister of the parish, and there was an old schoolmaster either of them served very satisfactorily for grandfathers and old uncles.  All I had to do was to shift some of their leading peculiarities, keeping the rest.  The old minister wore knee-breeches.  I clapped them on to the schoolmaster.  The schoolmaster carried a tall gold-headed cane.  I put this in the minister’s hands.  So with other things,—­I shifted them round, and got a set of characters who, taken together, reproduced the chief persons of the village where I lived, but did not copy any individual exactly.  Thus it went on for a while; but by and by my stock company began to be rather too familiarly known, in spite of their change of costume, and at last some altogether too sagacious person published what he called a ‘key’ to several of my earlier stories, in which I found the names of a number of neighbors attached to aliases of my own invention.  All the ‘types,’ as he called them, represented