turning from here on the
night of my disappearance, with Roxdal's clothes in a bundle I intended
to drop into the river, it was stolen from me in the fog, and the man
into whose possession it ultimately came appears to have committed
suicide. What, perhaps, ruined me was my desire to keep Clara's love,
and to transfer it to the survivor. Everard told her I was the best of
fellows. Once married to her, I would not have had much fear. Even if
she had discovered the trick, a wife cannot give evidence against her
husband, and often does not want to. I made none of the usual slips, but
no man can guard against a girl's nightmare after a day up the river and
a supper at the Star and Garter. I might have told the judge he was an
ass, but then I should have had penal servitude for bank robbery, and
that is worse than death. The only thing that puzzles me, though, is
whether the law has committed murder or I suicide.

* * * * *

My First Novel.

THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT.

BY MISS M. E. BRADDON.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MISS F. L. FULLER.

My first novel! Far back in the distinctness of childish memories I see
a little girl who has lately learnt to write, who has lately been given
a beautiful brand new mahogany desk, with a red velvet slope, and a
glass ink bottle, such a desk as might now be bought for three and
sixpence, but which in the forties cost at least half-a-guinea. Very
proud is the little girl, with the Kenwigs pigtails, and the Kenwigs
frills, of that mahogany desk, and its infinite capacities for literary
labour, above all, gem of gems, its stick of variegated sealing-wax,
brown, speckled with gold, and its little glass seal with an intaglio
representing two doves--Pliny's doves perhaps, famous in mosaic, only
the little girl had never heard of Pliny, or his Laurentine Villa.

[Illustration: LICHFIELD HOUSE, RICHMOND.]

Armed with that desk and its supply of stationery, Mary Elizabeth
Braddon--very fond of writing her name at full-length, and her address
also at full-length, though the word "Middlesex" offered
difficulties--began that pilgrimage on the broad high road of fiction,
which was destined to be a longish one. So much for the little girl of
eight years old, in the third person, and now to become strictly
autobiographical.

My first story was based on those fairy tales which first opened to me
the world of imaginative literature. My first attempt in fiction, and in
r