I was unable to accept this attention, but it ended all doubt in my mind that I had written my "Recollections" in a spirit likely to be helpful in the cultivation of good feeling between North and South. The reviews of the book, especially in the New England newspapers, confirmed this conviction, and I had every reason to be satisfied.
XLIII
A Novelist by Accident
Before "A Rebel's Recollections" appeared, I had written and published my first novel, "A Man of Honor."
That book, like the others, was the result of accident and not of deliberate purpose. The serial story had become a necessary feature of Hearth and Home, and we had made a contract with a popular novelist to furnish us with such a story to follow the one that was drawing to a close. Almost at the last moment the novelist failed us, and I hurriedly visited or wrote to all the rest of the available writers in search of a suitable manuscript. There were not so many novelists then as there are now. The search proved futile, and the editorial council was called together in something like panic to consider the alarming situation. The story then running was within a single instalment of its end, and no other was to be had. It was the unanimous opinion of the council—which included a member of the publishing firm as its presiding officer—that it would be disastrous to send out a single number of the paper without an instalment of a serial in it, and worse still, if it should contain no announcement of a story to come. The council, in its wisdom, was fully agreed that "something must be done," but no member of it could offer any helpful suggestion as to what that "something" should be. The list of available story writers had been completely exhausted, and it was hopeless to seek further in that direction. Even my old-time friend, John Esten Cooke, whose fertility of fiction was supposed to be limitless, had replied to my earnest entreaties, saying that he was already under contract for two stories, both of which were then in course of serial publication, and neither of which he had finished writing as yet. "Two sets of clamorous printers are at my heels," he wrote, "and I am less than a week ahead of them in the race between copy and proof slips."
As we sat in council, staring at each other in blank despair, I said, without really meaning it:
"If worse comes to worst, I'll write the story myself."
Instantly the member of the publishing firm who presided over the meeting answered: