a laundry and with my pen to help me
keep on. This was the only time I worked because I loved it, but the
task was too much, and when half-way through my Freshman year I had to
quit.

I worked away ironing shirts and other things in the laundry, and wrote
in all my spare time. I tried to keep on at both, but often fell asleep
with the pen in my hand. Then I left the laundry and wrote all the time,
and lived and dreamed again. After three months' trial I gave up
writing, having decided that I was a failure, and left for the Klondike
to prospect for gold. At the end of the year, owing to the outbreak of
scurvy, I was compelled to come out, and on the homeward journey of 1,900
miles in an open boat made the only notes of the trip. It was in the
Klondike I found myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. You get
your true perspective. I got mine.

While I was in the Klondike my father died, and the burden of the family
fell on my shoulders. Times were bad in California, and I could get no
work. While trying for it I wrote "Down the River," which was rejected.
During the wait for this rejection I wrote a twenty-thousand word serial
for a news company, which was also rejected. Pending each rejection I
still kept on writing fresh stuff. I did not know what an editor looked
like. I did not know a soul who had ever published anything. Finally a
story was accepted by a Californian magazine, for which I received five
dollars. Soon afterwards "The Black Cat" offered me forty dollars for a
story.

Then things took a turn, and I shall probably not have to shovel coal for
a living for some time to come, although I have done it, and could do it
again.

My first book was published in 1900. I could have made a good deal at
newspaper work; but I had sufficient sense to refuse to be a slave to
that man-killing machine, for such I held a newspaper to be to a young
man in his forming period. Not until I was well on my feet as a magazine-
writer did I do much work for newspapers. I am a believer in regular
work, and never wait for an inspiration. Temperamentally I am not only
careless and irregular, but melancholy; still I have fought both down.
The discipline I had as a sailor had full effect on me. Perhaps my old
sea days are also responsible for the regularity and limitations of my
sleep. Five and a half hours is the precise average I allow myself, and
no circumstance has yet arisen in my life that could keep