es, thinking that anyone could think it wit; and your humour your
severest critic could hardly accuse of being very new. What has happened
to you? What wicked fairy has bewitched you? I poured gold into your
lap, and you yield me back only crumpled leaves.'

With a jerk of his quaint legs he assumes a more upright posture.

'My dear Parent,' he begins in a tone that at once reverses our
positions, so that he becomes the monitor and I the wriggling
admonished; 'don't, I pray you, turn prig in your old age; don't sink
into the "superior person" who mistakes carping for criticism, and
jeering for judgment. Any fool can see faults, they lie on the surface.
The merit of a thing is hidden within it, and is visible only to
insight. And there is merit in me, in spite of your cheap sneers, sir.
Maybe I do not contain an original idea. Show me the book published
since the days of Caxton that does! Are our young men, as are the youth
of China, to be forbidden to think, because Confucius thought years ago?
The wit you appreciate now needs to be more pungent than the wit that
satisfied you at twenty; are you sure it is as wholesome? You cannot
smile at humour you would once have laughed at; is it you or the humour
that has grown old and stale? I am the work of a very young man, who,
writing of that which he knew and had felt, put down all things
truthfully as they appeared to him, in such way as seemed most natural
to him, having no thought of popular taste, standing in no fear of what
critics might say. Be sure that all your future books are as free from
unworthy aims.'

'Besides,' he adds, after a short pause, during which I have started to
reply, but have turned back to think again, 'is not this talk idle
between you and me? This apologetic attitude, is it not the cant of the
literary profession? At the bottom of your heart you are proud of me, as
every author is of every book he has written. Some of them he thinks
better than others; but, as the Irishman said of whiskies, they are all
good. He sees their shortcomings. He dreams he could have done better;
but he is positive no one else could.'

His little twinkling eyes look sternly at me, and, feeling that the
discussion is drifting into awkward channels, I hasten to divert it, and
we return to the chat about our early experiences.

I ask him if he remembers those dreary days when, written neatly in
round hand on sermon paper, he journeyed a ceaseless round from
newspaper t