isher, the
left-hand pocket, direct to the author, the right-hand pocket. Every
copy sold in a few weeks, and the ratio of expenses to profits, as I
remember it, has since prevented my injuring my health by sympathising
with publishers who talk of their risks and advertisements. The
down-country papers complained of the form of the thing. The wire
binding cut the pages, and the red tape tore the covers. This was not
intentional, but Heaven helps those who help themselves. Consequently,
there arose a demand for a new edition, and this time I exchanged the
pleasure of taking in money over the counter for that of seeing a real
publisher's imprint on the title-page. More verses were taken out and
put in, and some of that edition travelled as far as Hong-Kong on the
map, and each edition grew a little fatter, and, at last, the book came
to London with a gilt top and a stiff back, and was advertised in the
publishers' poetry department.

[Illustration]

But I loved it best when it was a little brown baby with a pink string
round its stomach; a child's child, ignorant that it was afflicted with
all the most modern ailments; and before people had learned, beyond
doubt, how its author lay awake of nights in India, plotting and
scheming to write something that should 'take' with the English public.

[Illustration: portrait by Geo. Hutchinson. Signed: Yours very truly A
Conan Doyle]

JUVENILIA

BY A. CONAN DOYLE

It is very well for the master craftsman with twenty triumphs behind him
to look down the vista of his successes, and to recall how he picked out
the path which has led him to fame, but for the tiro whose first book is
perilously near to his last one it becomes a more invidious matter. His
past presses too closely upon his present, and his reminiscences,
unmellowed by the flight of years, are apt to be rawly and crudely
personal. And yet even time helps me when I speak of my first work, for
it was written seven-and-twenty years ago.

[Illustration: I WAS SIX]

I was six at the time, and have a very distinct recollection of the
achievement It was written, I remember, upon foolscap paper, in what
might be called a fine bold hand--four words to the line, and was
illustrated by marginal pen-and-ink sketches by the author. There was a
man in it, and there was a tiger. I forget which was the hero, but it
didn't matter much, for they became blended into one about the time when
the tiger met the man. I was a re