milk-producing methods and
begins climbing trees and turning somersaults, she may be more
picturesque, but she is gathering nothing but goat-feathers. Seven
farmers, a school-teacher and a tin peddler may line up along the
fence and applaud her all afternoon until she is swelled with
pride, but when she gets back to the barn at sundown she will not
give much milk. She will not be known as a milch cow long; she will
be a low grade of corned beef, a couple of flank steaks and a few
pairs of three-dollar shoes.

I can sit down to write a story about a man who fell off a bridge
and landed in a kettle of tar on a canal boat and, before I have
completed a full paragraph, I can have stopped to clean the small
o, small e, and small a of my typewriter with a toothpick, stopped
to think about the pearl buttons on a vest I owned in 1894, the
Spanish-American War, what the French word for "illumination" is,
and whether I paid my last Liberty Loan installment. Before I have
finished that first paragraph I may have stopped to fill my
fountain pen, gone downtown to attend a meeting of the Red Cross
Committee, started to recatalogue my published stories, and taken a
trip to Chicago. Before I have got to the first period in the first
sentence I may have decided that I would not have a man fall off
the bridge but have a woman fall off it, that I would not have her
fall off a bridge but off the Woolworth Building, that I would not
have her fall into a kettle of tar but into a wagonload of feather
beds, that I would not have her fall at all, that I would not write
a humorous story at all, that I would not write at all, and that I
would, instead, get an empty cigar box and make a toy circus wagon
for my young son.

I once made an entire doll's house, two stories, four rooms,
kitchen and bath, with hand-carved stairways and electric lighting
throughout, the walls entirely weatherboarded, put in the carpets,
papered the walls, hung lace curtains at the windows and painted
the exterior, and all between two paragraphs of a story. I spent
three months on that little trip after goat-feathers, and in the
meantime Arnold Bennett probably wrote three novels of several
hundred thousand words each, gained an international reputation,
and passed me on the road to fame like an airplane passing a snail.
George Ade kept pegging away at his "Fables" with the regularity of
a day laborer, and Peter Finley Dunne ground out his "Mister
Dooley" like an unwe