“So as there was nobody left but my father and mother, you see for yourself I had no choice.  There was one great advantage in dealing with them,—­I knew them so thoroughly.  One naturally feels a certain delicacy it handling from a purely artistic point of view persons who have been so near to him.  One’s mother, for instance:  suppose some of her little ways were so peculiar that the accurate delineation of them would furnish amusement to great numbers of readers; it would not be without hesitation that a writer of delicate sensibility would draw her portrait, with all its whimsicalities, so plainly that it should be generally recognized.  One’s father is commonly of tougher fibre than one’s mother, and one would not feel the same scruples, perhaps, in using him professionally as material in a novel; still, while you are employing him as bait,—­you see I am honest and plain-spoken, for your characters are baits to catch readers with,—­I would follow kind Izaak Walton’s humane counsel about the frog you are fastening to your fish-hook:  fix him artistically, as he directs, but in so doing I use him as though you loved him.’

“I have at length shown up, in one form and another, all my townsmen who have anything effective in their bodily or mental make-up, all my friends, all my relatives; that is, all my blood relatives.  It has occurred to me that I might open a new field in the family connection of my father-in-law and mother-in-law.  We have been thinking of paying them a visit, and I shall have an admirable opportunity of studying them and their relatives and visitors.  I have long wanted a good chance for getting acquainted with the social sphere several grades below that to which I am accustomed, and I have no doubt that I shall find matter for half a dozen new stories among those connections of mine.  Besides, they live in a Western city, and one doesn’t mind much how he cuts up the people of places he does n’t himself live in.  I suppose there is not really so much difference in people’s feelings, whether they live in Bangor or Omaha, but one’s nerves can’t be expected to stretch across the continent.  It is all a matter of greater or less distance.  I read this morning that a Chinese fleet was sunk, but I did n’t think half so much about it as I did about losing my sleeve button, confound it!  People have accused me of want of feeling; they misunderstand the artist-nature, —­that is all.  I obey that implicitly; I am sorry if people don’t like my descriptions, but I have done my best.  I have pulled to pieces all the persons I am acquainted with, and put them together again in my characters.  The quills I write with come from live geese, I would have you know.  I expect to get some first-rate pluckings from those people I was speaking of, and I mean to begin my thirty-ninth novel as soon as I have got through my visit.”

IX

The society and its new secretary.