I

With the publication of his first book, _This Weary World_, Abner Joyce
immediately took a place in literature. Or rather, he made it; the book
was not like other books, and readers felt the field of fiction to be the
richer by one very vital and authentic personality.

_This Weary World_ was grim and it was rugged, but it was sincere and it
was significant. Abner's intense earnestness had left but little room for
the graces;--while he was bent upon being recognised as a "writer," yet
to be a mere writer and nothing more would not have satisfied him at all.
Here was the world with its many wrongs, with its numberless crying
needs; and the thing for the strong young man to do was to help set
matters right. This was a simple enough task, were it but approached with
courage, zeal, determination. A few brief years, if lived strenuously and
intensely, would suffice. "Man individually is all right enough," said
Abner; "it is only collectively that he is wrong." What was at fault was
the social scheme,--the general understanding, or lack of understanding.
A short sharp hour's work before breakfast would count for a hundred
times more than a feeble dawdling prolonged throughout the whole day.
Abner rose betimes and did his hour's work; sweaty, panting, begrimed,
hopeful, indignant, sincere, self-confident, he set his product full in
the world's eye.

Abner's book comprised a dozen short stories--twelve clods of earth
gathered, as it were, from the very fields across which he himself, a
farmer's boy, had once guided the plough. The soil itself spoke, the