he spoke slowly and monotonously and even
calmly, but I have never known so bitter a heart in any man as he
revealed to me that night. It was an arraignment of the wages of
life, an invocation to the ministers of hate.

Incidentally he told me the sum he had received for "The Red Badge
of Courage," which I think was something like ninety dollars, and he
repeated some lines from "The Black Riders," which was then in
preparation. He gave me to understand that he led a double literary
life; writing in the first place the matter that pleased himself,
and doing it very slowly; in the second place, any sort of stuff
that would sell. And he remarked that his poor was just as bad as it
could possibly be. He realized, he said, that his limitations were
absolutely impassable. "What I can't do, I can't do at all, and I
can't acquire it. I only hold one trump."

He had no settled plans at all. He was going to Mexico wholly
uncertain of being able to do any successful work there, and he
seemed to feel very insecure about the financial end of his venture.
The thing that most interested me was what he said about his slow
method of composition. He declared that there was little money in
story-writing at best, and practically none in it for him, because
of the time it took him to work up his detail. Other men, he said,
could sit down and write up an experience while the physical effect
of it, so to speak, was still upon them, and yesterday's impressions
made to-day's "copy." But when he came in from the streets to write
up what he had seen there, his faculties were benumbed, and he sat
twirling his pencil and hunting for words like a schoolboy.

I mentioned "The Red Badge of Courage," which was written in nine
days, and he replied that, though the writing took very little time,
he had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out
through most of his boyhood. His ancestors had been soldiers, and he
had been imagining war stories ever since he was out of
knickerbockers, and in writing his first war story he had simply
gone over his imaginary campaigns and selected his favorite
imaginary experiences. He declared that his imagination was hide
bound; it was there, but it pulled hard. After he got a notion for a
story, months passed before he could get any sort of personal
contract with it, or feel any potency to handle it. "The detail of a
thing has to filter through my blood, and then it comes out like a
native product, but it