I felt as if I had published them somewhere or
other before; but I could find no evidence of it, and so I ventured to
have them put in type.

And here I wish to take breath for a short, separate paragraph. I have
often felt, after writing a line which pleased me more than common, that
it was not new, and perhaps was not my own. I have very rarely, however,
found such a coincidence in ideas or expression as would be enough to
justify an accusation of unconscious plagiarism,--conscious plagiarism
is not my particular failing. I therefore say my say, set down my
thought, print my line, and do not heed the suspicion that I may not
be as original as I supposed, in the passage I have been writing. My
experience may be worth something to a modest young writer, and so
I have interrupted what I was about to say by intercalating this
paragraph.

In this instance my telltale suspicion had not been at fault. I had
printed those same lines, years ago, in "The Contributors' Club," to
which I have rarely sent any of my prose or verse. Nobody but the
editor has noticed the fact, so far as I know. This is consoling, or
mortifying, I hardly know which. I suppose one has a right to plagiarize
from himself, but he does not want to present his work as fresh from the
workshop when it has been long standing in his neighbor's shop-window.

But I have just received a letter from a brother of the late Henry
Howard Brownell, the poet of the Bay Fight and the River Fight, in
which he quotes a passage from an old book, "A Heroine, Adventures of
Cherubina," which might well have suggested my own lines, if I had
ever seen it. I have not the slightest recollection of the book or the
passage. I think its liveliness and "local color" will make it
please the reader, as it pleases me, more than my own more prosaic
extravagances:

LINES TO A PRETTY LITTLE MAID OF MAMMA'S.

"If Black Sea, Red Sea, White Sea, ran
One tide of ink to Ispahan,
If all the geese in Lincoln fens
Produced spontaneous well-made pens,
If Holland old and Holland new
One wondrous sheet of paper grew,
And could I sing but half the grace
Of half a freckle in thy face,
Each syllable I wrote would reach
From Inverness to Bognor's beach,
Each hair-stroke be a river Rhine,
Each verse an equinoctial line!"

"The immediate dismissal of the 'little maid' was the consequence."

I may as well say that our Delilah was not in the room when the las