alist in the age of the Romanticists. I
described at some length, both verbally and pictorially, the untimely
end of that wayfarer. But when the tiger had absorbed him, I found
myself slightly embarrassed as to how my story was to go on. 'It is very
easy to get people into scrapes, and very hard to get them out again,' I
remarked, and I have often had cause to repeat the precocious aphorism
of my childhood. On this occasion the situation was beyond me, and my
book, like my man, was engulfed in my tiger. There is an old family
bureau with secret drawers, in which lie little locks of hair tied up in
circles, and black silhouettes and dim daguerreotypes, and letters which
seem to have been written in the lightest of straw-coloured inks.
Somewhere there lies my primitive manuscript, where my tiger, like a
many-hooped barrel with a tail to it, still envelops the hapless
stranger whom he has taken in.

[Illustration: ON THE PRAIRIES AND THE OCEANS]

Then came my second book, which was told and not written, but which was
a much more ambitious effort than the first. Between the two, four years
had elapsed, which were mainly spent in reading. It is rumoured that a
special meeting of a library committee was held in my honour, at which a
bye-law was passed that no subscriber should be permitted to change his
book more than three times a day. Yet, even with these limitations, by
the aid of a well-stocked bookcase at home, I managed to enter my tenth
year with a good deal in my head that I could never have learned in the
class-rooms.

[Illustration: MY DEBUT AS A STORY-TELLER]

I do not think that life has any joy to offer so complete, so
soul-filling as that which comes upon the imaginative lad, whose spare
time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a corner with his
book, knowing that the next hour is all his own. And how vivid and fresh
it all is! Your very heart and soul are out on the prairies and the
oceans with your hero. It is you who act and suffer and enjoy. You carry
the long small-bore Kentucky rifle with which such egregious things are
done, and you lie out upon the topsail yard, and get jerked by the flap
of the sail into the Pacific, where you cling on to the leg of an
albatross, and so keep afloat until the comic boatswain turns up with
his crew of volunteers to handspike you into safety. What a magic it is,
this stirring of the boyish heart and mind! Long ere I came to my teens
I had traversed every s