Bow Bell’s Magazine, vol. 1.
All the Year Round Magazine, vol. 6.”
“Do you mean to go through all those articles?” he asked incredulously.
“It is now ten o’clock,” I replied. “Before four, I shall have gleaned all I want from every one of them. I shall perhaps also find time to go through some poetical indexes, and find a few good verses on almanacs, either to finish off—or to begin 318 with. And this,” I continued, “this is the kind of luck Mrs. Barr has. You, or any other writer, can have the same.”
Any one can understand, how work of this kind pursued with loving and ungrudging industry for over fifteen years, educated the mind and formed the taste. It kept me in touch with the finest European essayists, and I learned something from every book I opened. Perhaps it was not just what I was looking for, but it was worth making a note of—a note that often came into use for song or story years afterwards; and it was all conducive to that preparation I was unconsciously making for the sixty or more books it has been my privilege and pleasure to write.
CHAPTER XIX
THE BEGINNINGS OF A NEW LIFE
“I heard the letters talking, saw thought forming, felt the syllables writing as my hands wandered over the sensitized paper, smelling the perfume of dead men’s thoughts.”
I was nearly thirty-nine years old when I became a student at the Astor and began a life so different from the lives I had lived in Glasgow, Chicago, Austin and Galveston, that I might have been born again for it. Virtually, I was reborn. In that great and terrible alembic of pestilence and death through which I was passed in Galveston, all the small delights and frivolities of my life vanished; and I came out of its fires, holding firmly to one adequate virtue in their place—henceforward to be through all the days of my life, an all competent motive, and an all sufficient reward—the homely virtue of duty. And I have never regretted this exchange though at first I found, as all the servants of duty must do,
“That they who follow her commands,