illinery and the love-making.
But--alas for the futility of human hopes and desires!--that book was
destined never to be finished, for I had a violent quarrel with my
collaborators, and we have never spoken to each other from that day to
this.

So came to an untimely end my second serious attempt at writing a book;
for the stories that I had written in emulation of Josephine H---- were
only short ones, and were mostly unfinished.

I wasted a terrible deal of paper between my second try and my
seventeenth birthday, and I believe that I was, at that time, one of the
most hopeless trials of my father's life. He many times offered to
provide me with as much cheap paper as I liked to have; but cheap paper
did not satisfy my artistic soul, for I always liked the best of
everything. Good paper was my weakness--as it was his--and I used it, or
wasted it, which you will, with just the same lavish hand as I had done
aforetime.

When I was seventeen, I did a skit on a little book called 'How to Live
on Sixpence a Day.' It was my first soldier story--excepting the
original three soldiers and a pig--and introduced the 'sixpence a day'
pamphlet into a smart cavalry regiment, whose officers were in various
degrees of debt and difficulty, and every man was a barefaced portrait,
without the smallest attempt at concealment of his identity. Eventually
this sketch was printed in a York paper, and the honour of seeing myself
in print was considered enough reward for me. I, on the contrary, had no
such pure love of fame. I had done what I considered a very smart
sketch, and I thought it well worth payment of some kind, which it
certainly was.

After this, I spent a year abroad, improving my mind--and I think, on
the whole, it will be best to draw a veil over that portion of my
literary history, for I went out to dinner on every possible occasion,
and had a good time generally. Stay--did I not say my literary history?
Well, that year had a good deal to do with my literary history, for I
wrote stories most of the time, during a large part of my working hours
and during the whole of my spare time, when I did not happen to be going
out to dinner. And when I came home, I worked on just the same until,
towards the end of '75, I drew blood for the first time. Oh, the joy of
that first bit of money--my first earnings! And it was but a bit, a mere
scrap. To be explicit, it amounted to ten shillings. I went and bought a
watch on the strength of i