g up a
discussion on the woman's rights question, but being a wary little
body, and knowing that the debate would become a dispute and divide the
members into two hostile camps, she deferred this project indefinitely.
It would be time enough after she had her team well in hand, she said to
herself,--had felt their mouths and tried their paces. This expression,
as she used it in her thoughts, seems rather foreign to her habits, but
there was room in her large brain for a wide range of illustrations and
an ample vocabulary. She could not do much with her own muscles, but
she had known the passionate delight of being whirled furiously over
the road behind four scampering horses, in a rocking stage-coach, and
thought of herself in the Secretary's chair as not unlike the driver
on his box. A few weeks of rest had allowed her nervous energy to store
itself up, and the same powers which had distanced competition in the
classes of her school had of necessity to expend themselves in vigorous
action in her new office.

Her appeals had their effect. A number of papers were very soon sent
in; some with names, some anonymously. She looked these papers over, and
marked those which she thought would be worth reading and listening to
at the meetings. One of them has just been presented to the reader. As
to the authorship of the following one there were many conjectures. A
well-known writer, who had spent some weeks at Arrowhead Village, was
generally suspected of being its author. Some, however, questioned
whether it was not the work of a new hand, who wrote, not from
experience, but from his or her ideas of the condition to which a
story-teller, a novelist, must in all probability be sooner or later
reduced. The reader must judge for himself whether this first paper is
the work of an old hand or a novice.

SOME EXPERIENCES OF A NOVELIST.

"I have written a frightful number of stories, forty or more, I think.
Let me see. For twelve years two novels a year regularly: that makes
twenty-four. In three different years I have written three
stories annually: that makes thirty-three. In five years one a
year,--thirty-eight. That is all, is n't it? Yes. Thirty-eight, not
forty. I wish I could make them all into one composite story, as Mr.
Galton does his faces.

"Hero--heroine--mamma--papa--uncle--sister, and so on. Love
--obstacles--misery--tears--despair--glimmer of hope--unexpected
solution of difficulties--happy finale.

"La