come out of it all
if only the excitement had lasted a little longer. Unfortunately,
however, just at its height a spicy divorce case cropped up, and Jim was
crowded out and forgotten.

I told the boys this story of mine, after Jephson had done telling his,
and, when I had finished, we found it was nearly one o'clock. So, of
course, it was too late to do any more work to the novel that evening.

CHAPTER IV

We held our next business meeting on my houseboat. Brown was opposed at
first to my going down to this houseboat at all. He thought that none of
us should leave town while the novel was still on hand.

MacShaughnassy, on the contrary, was of opinion that we should work
better on a houseboat. Speaking for himself, he said he never felt more
like writing a really great work than when lying in a hammock among
whispering leaves, with the deep blue sky above him, and a tumbler of
iced claret cup within easy reach of his hand. Failing a hammock, he
found a deck chair a great incentive to mental labour. In the interests
of the novel, he strongly recommended me to take down with me at least
one comfortable deck chair, and plenty of lemons.

I could not myself see any reason why we should not be able to think as
well on a houseboat as anywhere else, and accordingly it was settled that
I should go down and establish myself upon the thing, and that the others
should visit me there from time to time, when we would sit round and
toil.

This houseboat was Ethelbertha's idea. We had spent a day, the summer
before, on one belonging to a friend of mine, and she had been enraptured
with the life. Everything was on such a delightfully tiny scale. You
lived in a tiny little room; you slept on a tiny little bed, in a tiny,
tiny little bedroom; and you cooked your little dinner by a tiny little
fire, in the tiniest little kitchen that ever you did see. "Oh, it must
be lovely, living on a houseboat," said Ethelbertha, with a gasp of
ecstasy; "it must be like living in a doll's house."

Ethelbertha was very young--ridiculously young, as I think I have
mentioned before--in those days of which I am writing, and the love of
dolls, and of the gorgeous dresses that dolls wear, and of the
many-windowed but inconveniently arranged houses that dolls inhabit--or
are supposed to inhabit, for as a rule they seem to prefer sitting on the
roof with their legs dangling down over the front door, which has always
appeared to me t