idence when
he nodded approval, and as the end approached I began to believe in it
myself.

[Illustration: AN AMERICAN SAW-MILL WHERE MR. ROBERTS WORKED]

It is only six years since the book was finished and sent to Messrs.
Smith, Elder, & Co., but it seems half a century ago, so much has
happened since then; and when it was accepted and published and paid
for, and actually reviewed favourably, I almost determined to take to
literature as a profession. I remembered that when I was a boy of eleven
I wrote a romance with twenty people, men and women, in it. I married
them all off at the end, being then in the childish mind of the most
usual novelist who believes, or pretends to believe, or at any rate by
implication teaches, that the interesting part of life finishes then
instead of beginning. I recalled the fact that I wrote doggerel verse at
the age of thirteen when I was at Bedford Grammar School, and that an
ardent, ignorant Conservatism drove me, when I was at Owens College,
Manchester, to lampoon the Liberal candidates in rhymes, and paste them
up in the big lavatory; and under the influence of these memories I
began to think that perhaps scribbling was my natural trade. I had tried
some forty different callings, including 'sailorising,' saw-mill work,
bullock-driving, tramping, and the selling of books in San Francisco,
with indifferent financial success, so perhaps my _metier_ was the
making of books instead. So I went on trying, and had a very bad time
for two years.

Having written 'The Western Avernus' in a kind of intuitive, instructive
way, it came easy enough to me, but very soon I began to think of the
technique of writing, and wrote badly. I had to look back at the best
part of that book to be assured I could write at all. For a long time it
was a consolation and a distress to me, for I had to find out that
knowledge must get into one's fingers before it can be used. Only those
who know nothing, or who know a great deal very well, can write
decently, and the intermediate state is exceedingly painful. Both the
public and private laudation of my American book made me unhappy then. I
thought I had only that one book in me.

Some of the letters I received from America, and, more particularly,
British Columbia, were anything but cheerful reading. One man, of whom I
had spoken rather freely, said I should be hanged on a cottonwood tree
if I ever set foot in the Colony again. I do not believe there are any
c