eginning of one of those romances is, or was, pretty
likely to be something like this:

"It was a black night. Heavy clouds had obscured the setting sun and
now, as the clock in the great stone tower boomed twelve, the darkness
was pitchy."

That is a good safe beginning. Midnight, a stone tower, a booming clock,
and darkness make an appeal to the imagination. On a night like that
almost anything may happen. A reader of one of my romances--and
readers there must be, for the things did, and still do, sell to some
extent--might be fairly certain that something WOULD happen before the
end of the second page. After that the somethings continued to happen as
fast as I could invent them.

But this story was different. The weather or the time had nothing to do
with its beginning. There were no solitary horsemen or strange wayfarers
on lonely roads, no unexpected knocks at the doors of taverns, no
cloaked personages landing from boats rowed by black-browed seamen with
red handkerchiefs knotted about their heads and knives in their
belts. The hero was not addressed as "My Lord"; he was not "Sir
Somebody-or-other" in disguise. He was not young and handsome; there was
not even "a certain something in his manner and bearing which hinted of
an eventful past." Indeed there was not. For, if this particular yarn or
history or chronicle which I had made up my mind to write, and which I
am writing now, had or has a hero, I am he. And I am Hosea Kent Knowles,
of Bayport, Massachusetts, the latter the village in which I was born
and in which I have lived most of the time since I was twenty-seven
years old. Nobody calls me "My Lord." Hephzy has always called me
"Hosy"--a name which I despise--and the others, most of them, "Kent" to
my face and "The Quahaug" behind my back, a quahaug being a very common
form of clam which is supposed to lead a solitary existence and to
keep its shell tightly shut. If anything in my manner had hinted at a
mysterious past no one in Bayport would have taken the hint. Bayporters
know my past and that of my ancestors only too well.

As for being young and handsome--well, I was thirty-eight years old last
March. Which is quite enough on THAT subject.

But I had determined to write the story, so I sat down to begin it. And
immediately I got into difficulties. How should I begin? I might begin
at any one of a dozen places--with Hephzy's receiving the Raymond and
Whitcomb circular; with our arrival in London; wi