ind of publisher were suddenly to stride in and
make me a bid of forty shillings or so for the lot. And then suddenly I
bethought me to send it to Messrs. Longmans, where it was fortunate
enough to fall into the hands of Mr. Andrew Lang. From that day the way
was smoothed to it, and, as things turned out, I was spared that keenest
sting of ill-success, that those who had believed in your work should
suffer pecuniarily for their belief. A door had been opened for me into
the temple of the Muses, and it only remained that I should find
something that was worthy of being borne through it.

'THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT'

BY M. E. BRADDON

MY first novel! Far back in the distinctness of childish memories I see
a little girl who has lately learnt to write, who has lately been given
a beautiful brand-new mahogany desk, with a red velvet slope, and a
glass ink-bottle, such a desk as might now be bought for
three-and-sixpence, but which in the forties cost at least half a
guinea. Very proud is the little girl, with the Kenwigs pigtails and the
Kenwigs frills, of that mahogany desk, and its infinite capacities for
literary labour, above all, gem of gems, its stick of variegated
sealing-wax, brown, speckled with gold, and its little glass seal with
an intaglio representing two doves--Pliny's doves, perhaps, famous in
mosaic, only the little girl had never heard of Pliny, or his Laurentine
Villa.

Armed with that desk and its supply of stationery, Mary Elizabeth
Braddon--very fond of writing her name at full length, and her address
also at full length, though the word 'Middlesex' offered
difficulties--began that pilgrimage on the broad high road of fiction,
which was destined to be a longish one. So much for the little girl of
eight years old, in the third person, and now to become strictly
autobiographical.

My first story was based on those fairy tales which first opened to me
the world of imaginative literature. My first attempt in fiction, and in
round-hand, on carefully pencilled double lines, was a story of two
sisters, a good sister and a wicked, and I fear adhered more faithfully
to the lines of the archetypal story than the writer's pen kept to the
double fence which should have ensured neatness.

The interval between the ages of eight and twelve was a prolific period,
fertile in unfinished MSS., among which I can now trace an historical
novel on the Siege of Calais, an Eastern story, suggested by a
passionate