All this work was done in the middle of hard professional work, with a boarding-house and many pupils.  I will dare to say that I was an active and diligent schoolmaster, and writing was only a recreation.  I could only get a few hours a week at it, and it never interfered with my main work.

My father died in 1896, and I wrote his life in two big volumes, a very solid piece of work; but it was after that, I think, that my real writing began.  I believe it was in 1899 that I slowly composed The House of Quiet, but I could not satisfy myself about the ending, and it was laid aside.

Then I was offered the task of editing Queen Victoria’s letters.  I resigned my mastership with a mixture of sorrow and relief.  The work was interesting and absorbing, but I did not like our system of education, nor did I believe in it.  But I put my beliefs into a little book called The Schoolmaster, which made its way.

I left my work as a teacher in 1903, when I was forty-one.  The House of Quiet appeared in that year anonymously, and began to sell.  I lived on at Eton with an old friend; went daily up to Windsor Castle, and toiled through volumes of papers.  But I found that it was not possible to work more than a few hours a day at the task of selection, because one’s judgment got fatigued and blurred.

The sudden cessation of heavy professional work made itself felt in an extreme zest and lightness of spirit.  It was a very happy and delightful time.  I was living among friends who were all very hard at work, and the very contrast of my freedom with their servitude was enlivening.  I was able, too, to think over my schoolmastering experience; and the result was The Upton Letters, an inconsequent but I think lively book, also published anonymously and rather disregarded by reviewers.  But the book was talked about and read; and for the next year or two I worked with indefatigable zest at writing.  I brought out monographs on Edward FitzGerald and Walter Pater; I wrote The Thread of Gold, which also succeeded; and in the next year I settled at Cambridge, and wrote From a College Window as a serial in the Cornhill, and The Gate of Death, both anonymously; and in the following year Beside Still Waters and The Altar Fire.  All this time the Queen’s letters were going quietly on in the background.

I have written half-a-dozen books since then.  But that is how I began my work; and the one point which is worth noticing is that the four books which have sold most widely, The House of Quiet, The Upton Letters, The Thread of Gold, and the College Window, were all of them issued anonymously, and the authorship was for a considerable time undetected.  So that it is fair to conclude that the public is on the look-out for books which interest it, and will find out what it wants; because none of those books owed anything whatever to my parentage or my position or my friends—­or indeed to the reviewers either; and it proves the