oved music and
wished to hear Mrs. Watterson sing, especially Longfellow's Rainy Day,
and left the others of us--Huxley, Mill, Tyndall and myself--at table.
Finding them a little off on the Irish question as well as American
affairs, I set them right as to both with much particularity and a great
deal of satisfaction to myself.

Whatever Huxley's occupation, it turned out that he had at least one
book-publishing acquaintance, Mr. Alexander Macmillan, to whom he
introduced me next day, for I had brought with me a novel--the great
American romance--too good to be wasted on New York, Philadelphia or
Boston, but to appear simultaneously in England and the United States,
to be translated, of course, into French, Italian and German. This was
actually accepted. It was held for final revision.

We were to pass the winter in Italy. An event, however, called me
suddenly home. Politics and journalism knocked literature sky high, and
the novel--it was entitled "One Story's Good Till Another Is Told"--was
laid by and quite forgotten. Some twenty years later, at a moment when I
was being lashed from one end of the line to the other, my wife said:

"Let us drop the nasty politics and get back to literature." She had
preserved the old manuscript, two thousand pages of it.

"Fetch it," I said.

She brought it with effulgent pride. Heavens! The stuff it was! Not a
gleam, never a radiance. I had been teaching myself to write--I had been
writing for the English market--perpendicular! The Lord has surely been
good to me. If the "boys" had ever got a peep at that novel, I had been
lost indeed!

IV

Yea, verily we were in London. Presently Artemus Ward and "the show"
arrived in town. He took a lodging over an apothecary's just across the
way from Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where he was to lecture. We had
been the best of friends, were near of an age, and only round-the-corner
apart we became from the first inseparable. I introduced him to the
distinguished scientific set into which chance had thrown me, and he
introduced me to a very different set that made a revel of life at the
Savage Club.

I find by reference to some notes jotted down at the time that the last
I saw of him was the evening of the 21st of December, 1866. He had dined
with my wife and myself, and, accompanied by Arthur Sketchley, who had
dropped in after dinner, he bade us good-by and went for his nightly
grind, as he called it. We were booked to take our d