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.
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