d the 'Arabian Nights,' he
knew almost by heart, and these we discussed, exchanging many pleasant
and profitable ideas upon the same. But the psychological novel, I
gathered, was not to his taste. He liked '_real_ stories,' he told me,
naively unconscious of the satire, 'where people did things.'

'I used to read silly stuff once,' he confessed humbly, 'Indian tales
and that sort of thing, you know, but Mama said I'd never be able to
write if I read that rubbish.'

'So you gave it up,' I concluded for him.

'Yes,' he answered. But a little sigh of regret, I thought, escaped him
at the same time.

'And what do you read now?' I asked.

'I'm reading Marlowe's plays and De Quincey's Confessions (he called him
Quinsy) just now,' was his reply.

'And do you understand them?' I queried.

'Fairly well,' he answered. Then added more hopefully, 'Mama says I'll
get to like them better as I go on.'

'I want to learn to write very, very well indeed,' he suddenly added
after a long pause, his little earnest face growing still more serious,
'then I'll be able to earn heaps of money.'

It rose to my lips to answer him that it was not always the books
written very, very well that brought in the biggest heaps of money; that
if heaps of money were his chiefest hope he would be better advised to
devote his energies to the glorious art of self-advertisement and the
gentle craft of making friends upon the Press. But something about the
almost baby face beside me, fringed by the gathering shadows, silenced
my middle-aged cynicism. Involuntarily my gaze followed his across the
strip of foot-worn grass, across the dismal-looking patch of ornamental
water, beyond the haze of tangled trees, beyond the distant row of
stuccoed houses, and, arrived there with him, I noticed many men and
women clothed in the garments of all ages and all lands, men and women
who had written very, very well indeed and who notwithstanding had
earned heaps of money, the hire worthy of the labourer, and who were not
ashamed; men and women who had written true words which the common
people had read gladly; men and women who had been raised to lasting
fame upon the plaudits of their day; and before the silent faces of
these, made beautiful by Time, the little bitter sneers I had counted
truth rang foolish in my heart, so that I returned with my young friend
to our green seat beside the foot-worn grass, feeling by no means so
sure as when I had started which of us