now am, good, bad, or indifferent.

If anybody gathers, however, from this simple narrative, that my upward
path from obscurity to a very modest modicum of popularity and success
was a smooth and easy one, he is immensely mistaken. I had a ten years'
hard struggle for bread, into the details of which I don't care to
enter. It left me broken in health and spirit, with all the vitality and
vivacity crushed out of me. I suppose the object of this series of
papers is to warn off ingenuous and aspiring youth from the hardest
worked and worst paid of the professions. If so, I would say earnestly
to the ingenuous and aspiring--'Brain for brain, in no market can you
sell your abilities to such poor advantage. Don't take to literature if
you've capital enough in hand to buy a good broom, and energy enough to
annex a vacant crossing.'

_'THE SHADOW OF A CRIME'_

BY HALL CAINE

I cannot follow Mr. Besant with any pitiful story of rejection at the
hands of publishers. If refusal is quite the best thing that can happen
to the candidate for literary honours, my fate has not been favourable.
No tale of mine has yet passed from publishing house to publishing
house. Except the first of the series, my stories have been accepted
before they have been read. In two or three instances they have been
bought before they have been written. It has occurred to me, as to
others, to have two or three publishers offering terms for the same
book. I have even been offered half payment in hand on account of a book
which I could not hope to write for years, and might never write at all.
Thus the most helpful confession which the more or less successful man
of letters can make for the comfort and cheer of his younger and less
fortunate brethren, it is out of my power to offer.

But I reflect that this is true of my literary experiences in the
character of a novelist only. I had an earlier and semi-subterranean
career that was very different. At eighteen I wrote a poem of a mystical
sort, which was printed (not at my own risk) and published under a
pseudonym. Happily, no man will ever identify me behind the romantic
name wherein I hid my own. Only one literary man knew my secret. That
was George Gilfillan, and he is dead. Then at twenty I wrote an
autobiography for another person, and was paid ten pounds for it. These
were really my first books, and I grow quite hot when I think of them.
At five-and-twenty I came up to London with the manuscr