thor of "Red
Pottage," in the presence of a large number of people, including the
late Mr. William Sharp, who related the occurrence to me. But the
incident ended uncomfortably for the claimant, which one would have
thought he might have foreseen.

But whether my books are mine or not, still whenever one of them appears
the same thing happens. I am pressed to own that such-and-such a
character "is taken from So-and-so." I have not yet yielded to these
exhortations to confession, partly, no doubt, because it would be very
awkward for me afterwards if I owned that thirty different persons were
the one and only original of "So-and-so."

My character for uprightness (if I ever had one) has never survived my
tacit, or in some cases emphatic, refusal to be squeezed through the
"clefts of confession."

It is perhaps impossible for those who do not write fiction to form any
conception how easily an erroneous idea gains credence that some one has
been "put in a book"; or, if the idea has once been entertained, how
impossible it is to eradicate it.

Looking back over a string of incidents of this kind in my own personal
experience, covering the last five-and-twenty years, I feel doubtful
whether I shall be believed if I instance some of them. They seem now,
after the lapse of years, frankly incredible, and yet they were real
enough to give me not a little pain at the time. It is the fashion
nowadays, if one says anything about oneself, to preface it by the
pontifical remark that what one writes is penned for the sake of others,
to save them, to cheer them, etc., etc. This, of course, now I come to
think of it, must be my reason also for my lapse into autobiography. I
see now that I only do it out of tenderness for the next generation.
Therefore, young writers of the future, now on the playing-fields of
Eton, take notice that my heart yearns over you. If, later on, you are
harrowed as I have been harrowed, remember

_J'ai passe par la._

Observe the prints of my goloshes on the steep ascent, and take courage.
And if you are perturbed, as I have been perturbed, let me whisper to
you the exhortation of the bankrupt to the terrestrial globe:

Never _you_ mind. Roll on.

When I first took a pen into my youthful hand, I lived in a very
secluded part of the Midlands, and perhaps, my little world being what
it was, it was inevitable that the originals of my characters,
especially the tiresome ones, should be immediately