is celebrated treatise
on reincarnation "A Drop of Blood" and "To Horse, to Horse" a stirring
romance of the Civil War.

I will not seek with convincing falsehoods and unscrupulous sophistry to
hide the fact that Jake D'Annunzio Spout was never quite a gentleman.
Others have endeavoured to do this and to my mind it is not only
degrading but quite unworthy of the man's genius to dwell on such paltry
failings as bad table manners, slight personal uncleanliness and the
like. Many of the greatest men in the world have bitten their nails, and
if we are to believe contemporary biographers, even the gloriously
verbose Carlyle was known to expectorate frequently and with the utmost
abandon while writing his world-famed fantasy "The French Revolution."

Jake Spout was perhaps twenty-six when he met H. Mackenzie Kump the
philanthropic millionaire whose intimate study "Spout, as I Knew Him"
met with such a brilliant success last year. Kump it was who cajoled and
eventually almost by force persuaded Jake to make a tour of the world.
Kump it was who nursed him devotedly through malaria in Mombasa,
dysentery in Delhi, hernia in Hong Kong, cramp in Cape Town and acute
earache in Edinburgh, and who soothed his bedside with almost womanly
tenderness during his fearful outbreak of varicose veins in Vancouver.
The work Spout accomplished in spite of slightly adverse circumstances
while abroad was quite stupendous and had it not been for his tragic
marriage would doubtless have been published with alacrity and read by
millions. It was presumably the will of an unkind fate that he should be
pursued and eventually captured by Esme Chaddle--a woman not only
without scruples of any description but possessing a revoltingly ugly
face and the temper of a fiend. It was on their honeymoon that she
became suddenly cross at breakfast and burnt all the unpublished MSS.
that she could find in the back yard, thereby destroying heartlessly the
luscious fruits of untold labour while abroad. Spout with the
contradictory stubbornness characteristic of so many geniuses
continued--though very hurt--to adore his vixenish wife with the blind
concentrated passion which for so many years had impregnated his work
and now, alas, was running to waste on such an unyielding desert. His
literary friends and admirers one and all shook their heads sadly,
perceiving reluctantly that the end was in sight. For two years Spout
wrote nothing but three short articles,[18] the