thirst, or
unromantic lunches, the morning mail, and the dinner-bell, and the
orders of one's pet dog--all are so many imperious summonses to breathe
the tingling air and stir the blood and muscle.

Be as uncomfortable or as cross about it as you choose, an out-of-door
study is sure to prove your best friend. You become a species of
literary tramp, and absorb something of the tramp's hygiene. It is
impossible to be "cooped" at your desk, if you have to cross a garden or
a lawn thirty times a day to get to it. And what reporter can reach that
sweet seclusion across the distant housemaid's wily and experienced art?
What autograph or lion hunter can ruin your best chapter by bombardment
in mid-morning?

In the farm-house study I remember one of my earliest callers from the
publishing world, that seems always to stand with clawing fingers
demanding copy of the people least able to give it. He was an emissary
from the "Youth's Companion," who threatened or cajoled me into a vow to
supply him with a certain number of stories. My private suspicion is
that I have just about at this present time completed my share in that
ancient bargain, so patient and long-suffering has this pleasant paper
been with me. I took particular delight in that especial visit,
remembering the time when the "Companion" gave my first pious little
sentence to print, and paid me with the paper for a year.

"The Gates Ajar" was attacked by the press. In fact it was virulently
bitten. The reviews of the book, some of them, reached the point of
hydrophobia. Others were found to be in a milder pathological condition.
Still others were gentle or even friendly enough. Religious papers waged
war across that girl's notions of the life to come as if she had been an
evil spirit let loose upon accepted theology for the destruction of the
world. The secular press was scarcely less disturbed about the matter,
which it treated, however, with the more amused good-humor of a man of
the world puzzled by a religious disagreement.

In the days of the Most Holy Inquisition there was an old phrase whose
poignancy has always seemed to me to be but half appreciated. One did
not say: He was racked. She was burned. They were flayed alive, or
pulled apart with little pincers, or clasped in the arms of the red-hot
Virgin. One was too well-bred for so bald a use of language. One
politely and simply said: He was put to the question.

The young author of "The Gates Ajar" was onl