I am not such an egotist as to suppose my experiences to be altogether
unique; but I know them to be curious and in places surprising.
Adventures, as Mr. Disraeli said a good many years ago, are to the
adventurous, and in a smallish kind of way I have sought and found
enough to stock the lives of a thousand stay-at-homes. At the first
blush it would not appear to the outside observer that the literary
life is likely to be fruitful in adventure; but in the circle of my own
acquaintance there are a good many men who have found it so.

In the city of Prague the most astonishing encounters pass for every-day
incidents. In these days of universal enlightenment nobody needs to be
told that Prague is the capital of Bohemia. There is a note that rings
false in the very name of that happy country now. Its traditions have
been vulgarised by people who have never passed its borders. All sorts
of charlatans have soiled its history with ignoble use, and the
very centre and citadel of its capital has an air of being built of
gingerbread. In point of fact, though its inhabitants are sparser than
they once were, and its occasional guests of distinction fewer, the
place itself is as real as ever it was. I have lived in it for a quarter
of a century, and, without vanity, may claim to know it as well as any
man alive.

Eight or ten years ago I was sitting in the Savage Club in the company
of four distinguished men of letters. One was the editor of a London
daily, and he was talking rather too humbly, as I thought, about his own
career.

'I do not suppose,' he said, 'that any man in my present position has
experienced in London the privations I knew when I first came here. I
went hungry for three days, twenty years back, and for three nights I
slept in the Park.'

One of the party turned to me. 'You cap that, Christie?'

I answered, 'Four nights on the Embankment. Four days hungry.'

My left-hand neighbour was a poet, and he chimed in laconically, 'Five.'

In effect, it proved that there was not one of us who had not slept in
that Hotel of the Beautiful Star which is always open to everybody. We
had all been frequent guests there, and now we were all prosperous,
and had found other and more comfortable lodgings. There is a gentler
brotherhood to be found among men who have put up in that great
caravanserai than can be looked for elsewhere. He jests at scars that
never felt a wound, and a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.