feeble in its execution; but to my youthful
ambition the actual commission to write a novel, with an advance
payment of fifty shillings to show good faith on the part of my
Yorkshire speculator, seemed like the opening of that pen-and-ink
paradise which I had sighed for ever since I could hold a pen. I had,
previously to this date, found a Maecenas in Beverley, in the person of a
learned gentleman who volunteered to foster my love of the Muses by
buying the copyright of a volume of poems and publishing the same at his
own expense--which he did, poor man, without stint, and by which noble
patronage of Poet's Corner verse he must have lost money. He had,
however, the privilege of dictating the subject of the principal poem,
which was to sing--however feebly--Garibaldi's Sicilian campaign.

[Illustration: THE SMOKING-ROOM]

The Beverley printer suggested that my Warwick Lane serial should
combine, as far as my powers allowed, the human interest and genial
humour of Dickens with the plot-weaving of G. W. R. Reynolds; and,
furnished with these broad instructions, I filled my ink-bottle, spread
out my foolscap, and, on a hopelessly wet afternoon, began my first
novel--now known as 'The Trail of the Serpent'--but published in Warwick
Lane, and later in the stirring High Street of Beverley, as 'Three Times
Dead.' In 'Three Times Dead' I gave loose to all my leanings to the
violent in melodrama. Death stalked in ghastliest form across my pages:
and villainy reigned triumphant till the Nemesis of the last chapter. I
wrote with all the freedom of one who feared not the face of a critic;
and, indeed, thanks to the obscurity of its original production, and its
re-issue as the ordinary two-shilling railway novel, this first novel of
mine has almost entirely escaped the critical lash, and has pursued its
way as a chartered libertine. People buy it and read it, and its faults
and follies are forgiven as the exuberances of a pen unchastened by
experience; but faster and more facile at that initial stage than it
ever became after long practice.

[Illustration: THE LIBRARY]

I dashed headlong at my work, conjured up my images of horror or of
mirth, and boldly built the framework of my story, and set my puppets
moving. To me, at least, they were living creatures, who seemed to
follow impulses of their own, to be impelled by their own passions, to
love and hate, and plot and scheme of their own accord. There was
unalloyed pleasure in t