collapse of Master Anthony, that a blindly-enterprising
printer of Beverley, who had seen my poor little verses in the _Beverley
Recorder_, made me the spirited offer of ten pounds for a serial story,
to be set up and printed at Beverley, and published on commission by a
London firm in Warwick Lane. I cannot picture to myself, in my
after-knowledge of the bookselling trade, any enterprise more futile in
its inception or more feeble in its execution; but to my youthful
ambition the actual commission to write a novel, with an advance payment
of fifty shillings to show good faith on the part of my Yorkshire
speculator, seemed like the opening of that pen-and-ink paradise which I
had sighed for ever since I could hold a pen. I had, previously to this
date, found a Maecenas in Beverley, in the person of a learned gentleman
who volunteered to foster my love of the Muses by buying the copyright
of a volume of poems and publishing the same at his own expense--which
he did, poor man, without stint, and by which noble patronage of Poet's
Corner verse, he must have lost money. He had, however, the privilege of
dictating the subject of the principal poem, which was to sing--however
feebly--Garibaldi's Sicilian campaign.

[Illustration: THE EVENING ROOM.]

The Beverley printer suggested that my Warwick Lane serial should
combine, as far as my powers allowed, the human interest and genial
humour of Dickens with the plot-weaving of G. W. R. Reynolds; and,
furnished with these broad instructions, I filled my ink bottle, spread
out my foolscap, and, on a hopelessly wet afternoon, began my first
novel--now known as "The Trail of the Serpent"--but published in Warwick
Lane, and later in the stirring High Street of Beverley, as "Three Times
Dead." In "Three Times Dead" I gave loose to all my leanings to the
violent in melodrama. Death stalked in ghastliest form across my pages;
and villainy reigned triumphant till the Nemesis of the last chapter. I
wrote with all the freedom of one who feared not the face of a critic;
and, indeed, thanks to the obscurity of its original production, and its
re-issue as the ordinary two-shilling railway novel, this first novel of
mine has almost entirely escaped the critical lash, and has pursued its
way as a chartered libertine. People buy it and read it, and its faults
and follies are forgiven as the exuberances of a pen unchastened by
experience; but faster and more facile at that initial stage than it