the boarding-house and elsewhere I had the reputation
of being "queer."

My only periods of real pleasure were my annual vacations in summer.
These glorious fortnights were spent at Bayport. There, at our old home,
for Hephzibah had sold the big Cahoon house and she and her father were
living in mine, for which they paid a very small rent, I was happy.
I spent the two weeks in sailing and fishing, and tramping along the
waved-washed beaches and over the pine-sprinkled hills. Even in Bayport
I had few associates of my own age. Even then they began to call me "The
Quahaug." Hephzy hugged me when I came and wept over me when I went away
and mended my clothes and cooked my favorite dishes in the interval.
Captain Barnabas sat in the big arm-chair by the sitting-room window,
looking out or sleeping. He took little interest in me or anyone
else and spoke but seldom. Occasionally I spent the Fourth of July or
Christmas at Bayport; not often, but as often as I could.

One morning--I was twenty-five at the time, and the day was Sunday--I
read a story in one of the low-priced magazines. It was not much of a
story, and, as I read it, I kept thinking that I could write as good
a one. I had had such ideas before, but nothing had come of them. This
time, however, I determined to try. In half an hour I had evolved a
plot, such as it was, and at a quarter to twelve that night the story
was finished. A highwayman was its hero and its scene the great North
Road in England. My conceptions of highwaymen and the North Road--of
England, too, for that matter--were derived from something I had read
at some time or other, I suppose; they must have been. At any rate,
I finished that story, addressed the envelope to the editor of the
magazine and dropped the envelope and its inclosure in the corner
mail-box before I went to bed. Next morning I went to the office as
usual. I had not the faintest hope that the story would be accepted. The
writing of it had been fun and the sending it to the magazine a joke.

But the story was accepted and the check which I received--forty
dollars--was far from a joke to a man whose weekly wage was half that
amount. The encouraging letter which accompanied the check was best of
all. Before the week ended I had written another thriller and this, too,
was accepted.

Thereafter, for a year or more, my Sundays and the most of my evenings
were riots of ink and blood. The ink was real enough and the blood
purely imag