d fishing, and was writing my book all
the time 'in my head,' as the children say. The one wise course to take
was to go back to my desk and empty my head, and then rest. My nerves
are too much shaken for travelling. An armchair and a cigar, and a
hundred and fiftieth reading of the glorious Walter Scott,--King,
Emperor, and President of Novelists,--there is the regimen that is doing
me good. All the other novel-writers I can read while I am at work
myself. If I only look at the 'Antiquary' or 'Old Mortality,' I am
crushed by the sense of my own littleness, and there is no work possible
for me on that day."

Wilkie Collins made the skeleton of a novel and then proceeded to put
the flesh on it. He was the greatest plotter that ever lived. He created
no truly great characters, but his stories are full of thrilling
pitfalls, into which the reader lunges.

Hugo Rosenthal-Bonin, the editor of _Ueber Land und Meer_ (one of the
most prominent of the illustrated journals of Germany), and the author
of many successful novels, writes for two hours immediately after
breakfast and dinner, and within this time regularly composes five
columns of reading matter, never rewriting a single line. While writing,
he has a piece of looking-glass lying beside him, the glittering of
which (so he says) stimulates and refreshes him; he also smokes cigars
during working hours, otherwise seldom. He works with ease and rapidity,
just as if he were speaking. Therefore, a novel of ten columns is
finished within two days, and a romance of one hundred columns is
completed in less than a month. He has never written more than one long
novel a year, his literary productiveness being limited by his duties as
editor.

Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson ("H. H.") composed with great rapidity, writing
on large sheets of yellow post-office paper, eschewing pen and ink, and
insisting that a lead pencil alone could keep pace with the swiftness of
her thoughts.

Emil Ritterhaus, the poet who "dwells by the castled Rhine," turns out
lyrical poems without any difficulty, and with wonderful rapidity. That
poem of his which was read at the consecration of the cathedral at
Cologne was composed in a few minutes, in the presence of his friend,
Ferdinand Hiller, not a line being changed afterward. When he is in the
proper mood, many a speech of his turns involuntarily into an
improvisation. Verses he pens in person, but he dictates all other
literary work. When at work, a good