happened to be the only book I ever
wrote that did--and when the Andover expressman brought in the
square package, just before tea, I felt my heart stand still with
mortification. Fortunately nobody saw the expressman. I always kept
my ventures to myself, and did not, that I can remember, read
any manuscript of mine to suffering relatives or friends, before
publication. Indeed, I carried on the writer's profession for many
years as if it had been a burglar's.

At the earliest moment possible I got myself into my little room, and
turned both keys upon myself and my rejected manuscript. But when
I came to read the publisher's letter, I learned that hope still
remained, a flickering torch, upon a darkened universe. That excellent
man did not refuse the story, but raised objections to certain points
or forms therein, to which he summoned my attention. The criticism
called substantially for the rewriting of the book. I lighted my lamp,
and, with the June beetles butting at my head, I wrote all night. At
three o'clock in the morning I put the last sentence to the remodelled
story--the whole was a matter of some three hundred and fifty pages
of manuscript--and crawled to bed. At six, I stole out and found the
expressman, that innocent and ignorant messenger of joy or woe. The
revised manuscript reached the publisher by ten o'clock, and his
letter of unconditional acceptance was in my hands before another
tea-time.

I have never been in the habit of writing at night, having been early
warned against this practice by the wisest of fathers (who notably
failed to follow his own advice); and this almost solitary experience
of the midnight oil remains as vivid as yesterday's sunset to me.
My present opinion of that night's exploit is, that it signified an
abnormal pride which might as well have received its due humiliation.
But, at the time, it seemed to be the inevitable or even the
creditable thing.

[Illustration: HENRY MILLS ALDEN, EDITOR OF "HARPER'S MAGAZINE."

From a photograph by G.C. Cox, New York.]

Sunday-school writers did books by sets in those days; perhaps they
do still. And at least two such sets I provided to order, each of four
volumes. Both of these, it so happens, have survived their day and
generation--the Tiny books, we called them, and the Gypsy books. Only
last year I was called upon to renew the copyright for Gypsy, a young
person now thirty years old in type.

There is a certain poetic justice in t