gates, was Mary. He was only six, but even then he
knew that never would he see again anything so beautiful. She was five;
but there was something in her manner of holding herself and the
imperious tilt of her head which made her seem almost five-and-a-half.

"I'm Mary," she said.

He wanted to say that he was John, but could not. He stood there
tongue-tied.

"I love you," she went on.

His heart beat tumultuously. He felt suffocated. He longed to say, "So do
I," but was afraid that it was not good English. Even then he knew that
he must be a writer when he grew up.

She leant forward and kissed him. He realized suddenly that he was in
love. The need for self-expression was strong upon him. Shyly he brought
out his last acid-drop and shared it with her. He had never seen her
since, but even now, twenty years after, he could not eat an acid-drop
without emotion, and a whole bag of them brought the scene back so
visibly as to be almost a pain.

Yes, he was to be a writer; there could be no doubt about that. Everybody
had noticed it. The Vicar had said, "Johnny will never do any good at
Polwollop, I fear"; and the farmer for whom John scared rooks had said,
"Thiccy la-ad seems daft-like," and one after another of Mrs. Penquarto's
friends had given similar testimony. And now here he was, at twenty-six,
in the little bed-sitting-room in Bloomsbury, ready to write the great
novel which should take London by storm. Polwollop seemed a hundred years
away.

Feverishly he seized pen and paper and began
to wonder what to write.

II

It was near the Albert Memorial that the great inspiration came to him
some weeks later. Those had been weeks of mingled hope and despair; of
hope as he had fondled again his treasured books and read their titles,
or gazed at the photograph of Mary; of despair as he had taken off his
belt and counted out his rapidly-decreasing stock of money, or reflected
that he was as far from completing his novel as ever. Sometimes in the
search for an idea he had frequented the restaurants where the great
Samuel Johnson himself had eaten, and sometimes he had frequented other
restaurants where even the great Samuel Johnson himself had been unable
to eat. Often he had gone into the British Museum and leant against a
mummy-case, or taken a 'bus to Chelsea and pressed his forehead against
the brass-plate which marked Carlyle's house, but no inspiration had
come. And then suddenly, quite close to the