Guest. That deserves caution. This is the second lucky suggestion that has come in my way to-day. Both are too good to be lost. The muse learns thrift and treasures up all suggestions.
Host. How does your muse ordinarily get her suggestions?
Guest. Oh, in all sorts of ways; from reading, from some one’s mere chance expression; sometimes from the particular insistence of some object in nature to be seen or heard; as though it had been waiting for its historian to come along. Usually, with the object is associated some slight touch of pathos. Dreams, too, offer suggestions. These suggestions, of course, are fantastic. They often have a touch of absurdity which the muse wisely omits, generally taking them for their allegorical face value. I dreamed once of seeing a rich cluster of purple blossoms, heavy with dew. The name, I learned was “honey-trope,” and so I transplanted the flower, root and branch, into a small garden plot of verses. I would think some of your whimsical situations and characters might come in this way.
Host. No, I don’t remember deriving suggestions from actual dreams; but I owe a great many to day-dreams. I used to entertain myself in this way constantly when a schoolboy. In walking home from school I would take up the thread of a plot and carry it on from day to day until the thing became a serial story. The habit was continued for years, simply because I enjoyed it—especially when walking. If anybody had known or asked me about it I should have confessed that I thought it a dreadful waste of time.
Guest. But it proved, I dare say, a sort of peripatetic training-school of fiction.
Host. Perhaps it might be called so. At any rate, years after, I used to go back to these stories for motives, especially in tales written for children. But there was another way in which, in later years, I have made use of day-dreams. I often woke very early in the morning—too early to think of rising, even if I had been thriftily inclined—and after some experimenting I found that the best way to put myself to sleep again was to construct some regular story.
Guest. (Stockton stories do not have that effect in the experience of readers!)
Host. Some regular story carried through to the end. I would begin a story one morning, continue it the next, and the next, until it ran into the serial. Some of these stories lasted for a long time; one ran through a whole year, I know. I got it all the way from America to Africa.
Guest. Perhaps you anticipated reality. For a friend of mine who reads every book of travels in Africa which she can lay hands on, firmly believes that the Dark Continent will be opened up as a pleasure and health resort for the whole world! But what became of the story?