My
only resource at such times was to keep working; keep beating harder and
harder at the wall which seemed to close me in, till at last I broke
through into the daylight beyond. In this case, I had really such a very
good grip of my characters that I need not have had the usual fear of
their failure to work out their destiny. But even when the thing was done
and I carried the completed manuscript to my dear old friend, the late
Henry Loomis Nelson, then editor of the Weekly, it was in more fear of
his judgment than I cared to show. As often happened with my manuscript
in such exigencies, it seemed to go all to a handful of shrivelled
leaves. When we met again and he accepted it for the Weekly, with a
handclasp of hearty welcome, I could scarcely gasp out my unfeigned
relief. We had talked the scheme of it over together; he had liked the
notion, and he easily made me believe, after my first dismay, that he
liked the result even better.

I myself liked the hero of the tale more than I have liked worthier men,
perhaps because I thought I had achieved in him a true rustic New England
type in contact with urban life under entirely modern conditions. What
seemed to me my esthetic success in him possibly softened me to his
ethical shortcomings; but I do not expect others to share my weakness for
Jeff Durgin, whose strong, rough surname had been waiting for his
personality ever since I had got it off the side of an ice-cart many
years before.

At the time the story was imagined Harvard had been for four years much
in the direct knowledge of the author, and I pleased myself in realizing
the hero's experience there from even more intimacy with the university
moods and manners than had supported me in the studies of an earlier
fiction dealing with them. I had not lived twelve years in Cambridge
without acquaintance such as even an elder man must make with the
undergraduate life; but it is only from its own level that this can be
truly learned, and I have always been ready to stand corrected by
undergraduate experience. Still, I have my belief that as a jay--the word
may now be obsolete--Jeff Durgin is not altogether out of drawing; though
this is, of course, the phase of his character which is one of the least
important. What I most prize in him, if I may go to the bottom of the
inkhorn, is the realization of that anti-Puritan quality which was always
vexing the heart of Puritanism, and which I had constantly felt one of
the mo