inary. My heroes spilled the latter and I the former.
Sometimes my yarns were refused, but the most of them were accepted and
paid for. Editors of other periodicals began to write to me requesting
contributions. My price rose. For one particularly harrowing and
romantic tale I was paid seventy-five dollars. I dressed in my best that
evening, dined at the Adams House, gave the waiter a quarter, and saw
Joseph Jefferson from an orchestra seat.

Then came the letter from Jim Campbell requesting me to come to New York
and see him concerning a possible book, a romance, to be written by me
and published by the firm of which he was the head. I saw my employer,
obtained a Saturday off, and spent that Saturday and Sunday in New York,
my first visit.

As a result of that visit began my friendship with Campbell and my first
long story, "The Queen's Amulet." The "Amulet," or the "Omelet," just as
you like, was a financial success. It sold a good many thousand copies.
Six months later I broke to my employers the distressing news that their
business must henceforth worry on as best it could without my aid; I was
going to devote my valuable time and effort to literature.

My fellow-clerks were surprised. Charlie Burns, head bookkeeper now, and
a married man and a father, was much concerned.

"But, great Scott, Kent!" he protested, "you're going to do something
besides write books, ain't you? You ain't going to make your whole
living that way?"

"I am going to try," I said.

"Great Scott! Why, you'll starve! All those fellows live in garrets and
starve to death, don't they?"

"Not all," I told him. "Only real geniuses do that."

He shook his head and his good-by was anything but cheerful.

My plans were made and I put them into execution at once. I shipped my
goods and chattels, the latter for the most part books, to Bayport and
went there to live and write in the old house where I was born. Hephzy
was engaged as my housekeeper. She was alone now; Captain Barnabas had
died nearly two years before.

Among the Captain's papers and discovered by his daughter after his
death was a letter from Strickland Morley. It was written from a town in
France and was dated six years after Morley's flight and the disclosure
of his crookedness. Captain Barnabas had never, apparently, answered the
letter; certainly he had never told anyone of its receipt by him. The
old man never mentioned Morley's name and only spoke of Ardelia during
his la