J. K. Jamison.
[THE EARLY WORK OF THE AUTHOR OF "BEN-HUR."]
BY MATTIE DYER BRITTS.
The writer of this sketch has no need to depend upon the evidence of others for the facts given; she has but to cross a shady street and tap at the most hospitable door in the wide world, to sit at her ease in the fine old library enriched by the gifts of a king, and talk with General Wallace or his wife.
It was upon an occasion like this that she remarked: "General, the people who are so much interested in your work sometimes wonder how you came to begin it. Would you be willing to give us an idea of your method?"
"Method?" was the reply, with the genial smile and flash of the keen dark eye which still renews the youth of the veteran warrior-poet. "I have no method. If my composition has any excellence, set it down, first and last, to that simple fact. In writing, as in speech, I think that modes of expression should depend upon feeling—not studied, but the impulse of the moment."
"But you had a method of study in your school-days?"
"Not I. My school-days were very few when I was a boy. My father regularly sent me, and paid my tuition bills, but I as regularly played truant. I ran wild in the woods of my native Indiana as free and happy as the squirrels and rabbits, which scarcely took the trouble to keep out of my pathway, so accustomed to my presence did they become. I hunted, fished, staid in the woods, and slept with my dog, and came out as strong and healthy as an oak sapling, without the least idea that I was laying the foundation for the constitution which could in later years withstand the hardships and exposures of camp and field. Health was so absolute it was not thought of."
"You must, however, have been fond of books."