y
first unhappy venture, 'The Colour-Sense' might be counted a distinct
success. It brought me in, during the course of about ten years,
something like 25_l._ or 30_l._ As it only took me eighteen months to
write, and involved little more than five or six thousand references,
this result may be regarded as very fair pay for an educated man's time
and labour. I have sometimes been reproached by thoughtless critics for
deserting the noble pursuit of science in favour of fiction and filthy
lucre. If those critics think twenty pounds a year a sufficient income
for a scientific writer to support himself and a growing family
upon--well, they are perfectly at liberty to devote their own pens to
the instruction of their kind without the slightest remonstrance or
interference on my part.

I won't detail in full the history of my various intermediate books,
most of which were published first as newspaper articles, and afterwards
collected and put forth on a small royalty. Time is short, and art is
long, so I'll get on at once to my first novel. I drifted into fiction
by the sheerest accident. My friend, Mr. Chatto, most generous of men,
was one of my earliest and staunchest literary supporters. From the
outset of my journalistic days, he printed my articles in _Belgravia_
and the _Gentleman's Magazine_ with touching fidelity; and I take this
opportunity of saying in public that to his kindness and sympathy I owe
as much as to anyone in England. Some people will have it there is no
such thing as 'generosity' in publishers. I beg leave to differ from
them. I know the commercial value of literary work as well as any man,
and I venture to say that both from Mr. Chatto and from Mr. Arrowsmith,
of Bristol, I have met, time and again, with what I cannot help
describing as most generous treatment. One day it happened that I wanted
to write a scientific article on the impossibility of knowing one had
seen a ghost, even if one saw one. For convenience sake, and to make the
moral clearer, I threw the argument into narrative form, but without the
slightest intention of writing a story. It was published in _Belgravia_
under the title of 'Our Scientific Observations on a Ghost,' and was
reprinted later in my little volume of 'Strange Stories.' A little while
after, to my immense surprise, Mr. Chatto wrote to ask me whether I
could supply him with another story, like the last I had written, for
the _Belgravia Annual_. I was rather taken aback a