the recall of my dearest literary oath, in this year of eminent
autobiographical examples, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five.

"There is ----, who has written a charming series of personal
reminiscences, and ---- ----, and ----.

"You might meet your natural shrinking by allowing yourself to treat
especially of your literary life; including, of course, whatever went
to form and sustain it."

"I suppose I _might_," I sigh. The answer is faint; but the deed is
decreed. Shall I be sorry for it?

It is a gray day, on gray Cape Ann, as I write these words. The fog is
breathing over the downs. The outside steamers shriek from off the
Point, as they feel their way at live of noon, groping as though it
were dead of night, and stars and coast-lights all were smitten dark,
and every pilot were a stranger to his chart.

A stranger to my chart, I, doubtful, put about, and make the untried
coast.

At such a moment, one thinks wistfully of that fair, misty world which
is all one's own, yet on the outside of which one stands so humbly,
and so gently. One thinks of the unseen faces, of the unknown friends
who have read one's tales of other people's lives, and cared to read,
and told one so, and made one believe in their kindness, and affection
and fidelity for thirty years. And the hesitating heart calls out to
them: Will _you_ let me be sorry? Thirty years! It is a good while
that you and I have kept step together. Shall we miss it now? If _you_
will care to hear such chapters as may select themselves from the
story of the story-teller,--you have the oldest right to choose, and
I, the happy will to please you if I can.

* * * * *

The lives of the makers of books are very much like other people's in
most respects, but especially in this: that they are either rebels to,
or subjects of, their ancestry. The lives of some literary persons
begin a good while after they are born. Others begin a good while
before.

Of this latter kind is mine.

It has sometimes occurred to me to find myself the possessor of a sort
of unholy envy of writers concerning whom our stout American phrase
says that they have "made themselves." What delight to be aware that
one has not only created one's work, but the worker! What elation in
the remembrance of the battle against a commercial, or a scientific,
or a worldly and superficial heredity; in the recollection of the tug
with habit and education, and the ov