seek with their own moods are few.

According to my custom, I said nothing (so far as I can remember) to
any person about the book.

It cannot be said that I had any hope of success with it; or that,
in my most irrational dreams, anything like the consequences of its
publication ever occurred to my fancy. But I did distinctly understand
that I had set forth upon a venture totally dissimilar to the safe and
respectable careers of my dozen Sunday-school books.

I was asked only the other day why it was that, having such a rare
critic at first hand as my father, I did not more often submit my
manuscripts to his judgment. It would be difficult to say precisely
why. The professor of rhetoric was a very busy man; and at that time
the illness which condemned him to thirty years of invalid suffering
was beginning to make itself manifest. I can remember more often
throwing down my pen to fly out and beg the children to be quiet in
the garden while the sleepless man struggled for a few moments' rest
in the daytime; or stealing on tiptoe to his locked door, at any hour
of the night, to listen for signs of sudden illness or need of help;
these things come back more easily than the desire to burden him with
what I wrote.

Yet perhaps that abnormal pride, whose existence I have admitted, had
quite as much to do with this restraint.

When a thing was published, then quickly to him with it! His sympathy
and interest were unfailing, and his criticism only too gentle; though
it could be a sword of flame when he chose to smite.

Unknown to himself I had dedicated "The Gates Ajar" to him. In this
dedication there was a slip in good English, or, at least, in such
English as the professor wrote and spoke. I had used the word "nears"
as a verb, instead of its proper synonym, "approaches." He read the
dedication quietly, thanked me tenderly for it, and said nothing. It
was left for me to find out my blunder for myself, as I did, in due
time. He had not the heart to tell me of it then. Nor did he insinuate
his consciousness that the dedication might seem to involve him--as it
did in certain citadels of stupidity--in the views of the book.

The story was sent to its publishers, Messrs. Ticknor and Fields, and
leisurely awaited their verdict. As I had written somewhat for their
magazines, "The Atlantic" and "Our Young Folks," I did not come as
quite a stranger. Still, the fate of the book hung upon a delicate
scale. It was two years from