nage to make
her go into the house; try as I would, it was impossible. It never would
come right. But to-day I remembered that there is a mirror in every
hall, and that every lady wears a bonnet.

"As soon as I remembered that, she went where I wanted her to, and did
everything she had to. You would think a bonnet is a small affair, but
everything depended on that bonnet."

As I recall this conversation, I feel sure that my father was talking
about that scene in "Anna Karenina" where ANNA went to see her son.

Although in the final form of the novel nothing is said in this scene
either about a bonnet or a mirror,--nothing is mentioned but a thick
black veil,--still, I imagine that in its original form, when he was
working on the passage, my father may have brought Anna up to the
mirror, and made her straighten her bonnet or take it off.

I can remember the interest with which he told me this, and it now
seems strange that he should have talked about such subtle artistic
experiences to a boy of seven who was hardly capable of understanding
him at the time. However, that was often the case with him.

I once heard from him a very interesting description of what a writer
needs for his work:

"You cannot imagine how important one's mood is," he said. "Sometimes
you get up in the morning, fresh and vigorous, with your head clear, and
you begin to write. Everything is sensible and consistent. You read it
over next day, and have to throw the whole thing away, because, good
as it is, it misses the main thing. There is no imagination in it,
no subtlety, none of the necessary something, none of that only just
without which all your cleverness is worth nothing. Another day you
get up after a bad night, with your nerves all on edge, and you think,
'To-day I shall write well, at any rate.' And as a matter of fact, what
you write is beautiful, picturesque, with any amount of imagination. You
look it through again; it is no good, because it is written stupidly.
There is plenty of color, but not enough intelligence.

"One's writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination
are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it's
all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh."

As a matter of fact, there was no end to the rewriting in my father's
works. His industry in this particular was truly marvelous.

We were always devoted to sport from our earliest childhood. I can
remember as well as