“How?”

“Well, it’s a long story. You must know that when I am staying in a hotel, or on board ship, I can’t go to bed while there is one person left to talk to in the bar. This habit, I don’t know what ways exactly, gave me a cough that I couldn’t get rid of, till an old Auntie from Georgia told me to try drops of rum on sugar. It took away my cough, and I liked it fine. I went on taking it after my cough had gone; it grew to be a habit, and before I knew where I was my digestion had gone. I tried all the doctors I could hear of, at home, and in England, and in Germany, including Austria, to cure that. But it was not possible; all they could do for me was to find out what I liked best to eat or drink, and tell me to do without it. I was wasting to a shadow, so I sent for my own doctor, and said to him, ‘Doctor, I can’t stand this any longer; life isn’t worth living, what there is going to be of it, and that doesn’t seem to be much. I am going to commit suicide.’ ‘Maybe it is the best thing to do,’ he said. ‘Do you know what is the most painless form of death?’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I am going to eat and drink everything I like best for a week, and according to all of you, it ought to take much less time than that.’

“So I did, and I assure you, Mr. Sladen, before the week was up, I was as well as ever I had been in my life.”

He could reel off this sort of story by the hour, with that slow drawl of his, which was so mightily effective.

Frank Stockton, the kindliest and most delicate humorist of America, I knew very well, and any one who knew him intimately could not help regarding him with affection. He was a little man with a club foot, and rather a timid expression, which he made use of when telling his immortal after-dinner stories; he emphasised the timidity until the point came, and his face was wreathed with smiles. Stockton was a great gardener. His garden out at the Holt near the Convent station in New Jersey was large and beautiful, and the product of his own imagination. It seemed incredible that a garden like that should have no kind of a hedge or fence, but he explained that in America to put a fence round your garden is considered an insult to the democracy, who by no means always deserve to be trusted in this matter.

Stockton was so good-natured that his wife used to say he would never have done any work at all if he had not had a dragon at his side to guard him. She was not much like a dragon. But on one point she was inexorable; when the time had really come for him to set about fulfilling a contract, she insisted on his going into New York to a hotel with as blank an outlook as possible, so that he should not waste time over gardening; he could not trust himself within sight of a green leaf.

Stockton was a wood-engraver to start with, and was thirty-eight years old before he abandoned it to do editorial work. A year later he became assistant-editor of St. Nicholas, the American children’s magazine. It was not until 1880 that he gave it up to devote himself entirely to book-writing. Up till 1879, the year in which he published Rudder Grange, he only wrote children’s books, and he did not publish his next book for grown-ups, The Lady or the Tiger, for another five years.

Another old member of the Vagabond Club, always a very intimate friend of Jerome’s, who was often at our at-homes was Pett Ridge, the humorist whose knowledge of the East End of London is sometimes compared to Dickens’s; indeed, many consider him unequalled as a writer of Cockney humour and an interpreter of Cockney humanity. Unlike Jerome, Pett Ridge, who also has very earnest convictions and has done a world of good, has the humorist in him always near the surface. He used to be a constant speaker at literary clubs, and most popular for his never-failing fund of humour, which was heightened by his demure delivery.

JEROME K. JEROME
Drawn by Yoshio Markino