e, which is about the worst of it; and when all is
done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on
the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in
the profits of our common enterprise.

I can but give an instance or so of what part is done sleeping and what
part awake, and leave the reader to share what laurels there are, at his
own nod, between myself and my collaborators; and to do this I will
first take a book that a number of persons have been polite enough to
read, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." I had long been
trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for
that strong sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon
and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature. I had even written
one, "The Travelling Companion," which was returned by an editor on the
plea that it was a work of genius and indecent, and which I burned the
other day on the ground that it was not a work of genius, and that
"Jekyll" had supplanted it. Then came one of those financial
fluctuations to which (with an elegant modesty) I have hitherto referred
in the third person. For two days I went about racking my brains for a
plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the
window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for
some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of
his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously, although I
think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies. The meaning
of the tale is therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in my garden of
Adonis, and tried one body after another in vain; indeed, I do most of
the morality, worse luck! and my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we
call a conscience. Mine, too, is the setting, mine the characters. All
that was given me was the matter of three scenes, and the central idea
of a voluntary change becoming involuntary. Will it be thought
ungenerous, after I have been so liberally ladling out praise to my
unseen collaborators, if I here toss them over, bound hand and foot,
into the arena of the critics? For the business of the powders, which so
many have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all, but the
Brownies'. Of another tale, in case the reader should have glanced at
it, I may say a word: the not very defensible story of "Olalla." Here
the court, the mother, the mother's niche, Olalla,