ife and sufferings, for I don't suppose anything will
ever happen to me again. To be sure, in the book I have just been
reading a girl marries her groom, leaves him, rejects two lovers, kills
her husband, accepts one lover, loses him, marries the second, first
husband comes to light again and is shot, marries second husband over
again, and goes a-journeying with second husband and first lover, first
cousin and two children, in the South of France, before she is
twenty-two years old. But in my country girls think themselves extremely
well off for adventures with one marriage and no murder. But then the
girls in my country do not have the murderous black eyes which shine so
in romances.

My book being fairly wound up and set a-going, of course you wish to
know what came of it. Don't pretend you don't care, for you know you do.
Only don't look at me too closely, or you will disconcert me. Veil now
and then your intent eyes, or my story will surely droop under their
steadfastness. Look sometimes into yonder sunset sky and the beautiful
reticulations drawn darkly against its glowing sheets of color. You
will none the less listen, and I shall all the more enjoy.

You have read much about the anxieties, the forebodings, the
anticipatory tremors of new authors. So have I, but I never felt
them,--not a single foreboding. I was delighted to write a book, and it
never occurred to me that everybody would not be just as delighted to
read it. The first time my book weighed on me was one morning when a
thin, meagre little letter came to me, which turned out to be only a
card bearing the laconic inscription,--

"Twelve copies 'New Sun' sent by express, with the compliments of the
Publishers."

The "New Sun" was my book. I put on my hat and walked straightway up to
the hole in the rock, about a mile round the corner, where the
expressman always leaves my parcels, and took up the package to bring
home. It was very heavy. I balanced it first on one arm and then on the
other, until, as the poet has it,--

"Both were nigh to breaking."

Then I lifted it by the cords, but they cut my fingers. Then I
remembered the natural law, that internal atmospheric pressure prevents
any consciousness of the enormous external pressure exerted by an
atmosphere forty-five miles thick, and applied the law, saying, "These
books have all been upon the inside of my head, of course I shall not
feel them on the outside." So I put the package on my head