had been kind to me
in the past, singling me out, on account of some scholastic successes,
for an annual vacation at the seaside. It has only just struck me, after
all these years, that, if he had not done so, I should not have found
the page of _Society_, and so not have perpetrated the deplorable
compositions.

In the course of a bad quarter of an hour, he told me that the ballad
was tolerable, though not to be endured; he admitted the metre was
perfect, and there wasn't a single false rhyme. But the prose novelette
was disgusting. "It is such stuff," said he, "as little boys scribble up
on walls."

I said I could not see anything objectionable in it.

"Come now, confess you are ashamed of it," he urged. "You only wrote it
to make money."

"If you mean that I deliberately wrote low stuff to make money," I
replied calmly, "it is untrue. There is nothing I am ashamed of. What
you object to is simply realism." I pointed out Bret Harte had been as
realistic, but they did not understand literature on that committee.

"Confess you are ashamed of yourself," he reiterated, "and we will look
over it."

"I am not," I persisted, though I foresaw only too clearly that my
summer's vacation was doomed if I told the truth. "What is the use of
saying I am?"

The headmaster uplifted his hands in horror. "How, after all your
kindness to him, he can contradict you----!" he cried.

"When I come to be your age," I conceded to the member of the committee,
"it is possible I may look back on it with shame. At present I feel
none."

In the end I was given the alternative of expulsion or of publishing
nothing which had not passed the censorship of the committee. After
considerable hesitation I chose the latter.

This was a blessing in disguise; for, as I have never been able to
endure the slightest arbitrary interference with my work, I simply
abstained from publishing. Thus, although I still wrote--mainly
sentimental verses--my nocturnal studies were less interrupted. Not till
I had graduated, and was of age, did I return to my inky vomit. Then
came my next first book--a real book at last.

In this also I had the collaboration of a fellow-teacher, Louis Cowen by
name. This time my colleague was part-author. It was only gradually that
I had been admitted to the privilege of communion with him, for he was
my senior by five or six years, and a man of brilliant parts who had
already won his spurs in journalism, and who enjoyed des