tory gave me little or no emotion. Once only
did I get a genuine thrill, and that was at the point where young Jasper
finds the sailor's cap (p. 25), and why at this point more than another
is past explaining. In later efforts I have written several pages with a
shaking pen and amid dismal signs of grief; and, on revision, have
usually had to tear those pages up. On the whole, my short experience
goes against

_si vis me flere, dolendum est
Primum ipsi tibi._

But if _on revision_ an author is moved to tears or laughter by any part
of his work, then he may reckon pretty safely upon it, no matter with
how stony a gravity it was written.

[Illustration: THE OLD STUDY]

Book I.--just half the tale--was finished then, and put aside. The
Oxford Michaelmas Term was beginning, and there were lectures to be
prepared; but this was not all the reason. To tell the truth, I had
wound up my story into a very pretty coil, and how to unwind it was past
my contriving. When the book appeared, its critics agreed in pronouncing
Part I. to be a deal better than Part II., and they were right; for Book
II. is little more than a violent cutting of half-a-dozen knots that had
been tied in the gayest of spirits; and it must be owned, moreover, that
the long arm of coincidence was invoked to perform a great part of the
cutting. For the time, however, the unfinished MS. lay in the drawer of
my writing-table; and I went back to Virgil and Aristophanes and
scribbled more verses for the _Oxford Magazine_. None of my friends knew
at that time of my excursion into fiction; but one of them possesses the
acutest eye in Oxford, and, with just a perceptible twinkle in it, he
asked me suddenly, one evening towards the end of Term, if I had yet
begun to write a novel. The shot was excellently fired, and I
surrendered my MS. at once, the more gladly because believing in his
judgment. Next morning he asserted that he had sat up half the night to
read it. His look was of the freshest, but he came triumphantly out of
cross-examination, and urged me to finish the story. In my elated mood I
would have promised anything, and set to work at once to think out the
rest of the plot; but it was not until the Easter Vacation that I
finished the book, in a farmhouse at the head of Wastwater.

Another friend was with me, who, in the intervals of climbing, put all
his enthusiasm into Aristotelian logic while I hammered away at the
'immortal product,'