out what I wanted at the hotel
rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it; combative on the
platform in defence of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or
disapproval in the home, and am a coward at heart in private while a
good fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an
hour screwing up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my
duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for
a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming
some lad or lass for doing their work badly! An unkind look or word has
availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while
on the platform opposition makes me speak my best. So I slid into
marriage blindly and stupidly, fearing to give pain; fretted my heart
out for a year; then, roused by harshness and injustice, stiffened and
hardened, and lived with a wall of ice round me within which I waged
mental conflicts that nearly killed me; and learned at last how to live
and work in armour that turned the edge of the weapons that struck it,
and left the flesh beneath unwounded, armour laid aside, but in the
presence of a very few.

My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up
two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of
a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character,
"The Lives of the Black Letter Saints." For the sake of the
unecclesiastically trained it may be as well to mention that in the
Calendar of the Church of England there are a number of Saints' Days;
some of these are printed in red, and are Red Letter Days, for which
services are appointed by the Church; others are printed in black, and
are Black Letter Days, and have no special services fixed for them. It
seemed to me that it would be interesting to take each of these days
and write a sketch of the life of the saint belonging to it, and
accordingly I set to work to do so, and gathered various books of
history and legend where-from to collect my "facts." I do not in the
least know what became of that valuable book; I tried Macmillans with
it, and it was sent on by them to some one who was preparing a series
of Church books for the young; later I had a letter from a Church
brotherhood offering to publish it, if I would give it as "an act of
piety" to their order; its ultimate fate is to me unknown.

The short stories were more fortunate. I sent the first t