under the stress of dire necessity hunted for without enthusiasm, in a
perfunctory, grumpy worry, in the "Where the devil is the beastly thing
gone to?" ungracious spirit. Where indeed! It might have been reposing
behind the sofa for a day or so. My landlady's anaemic daughter (as
Ollendorff would have expressed it), though commendably neat, had a
lordly, careless manner of approaching her domestic duties. Or it
might even be resting delicately poised on its point by the side of
the table-leg, and when picked up show a gaping, inefficient beak which
would have discouraged any man of literary instincts. But not me! "Never
mind. This will do."

O days without guile! If anybody had told me then that a devoted
household, having a generally exaggerated idea of my talents and
importance, would be put into a state of tremor and flurry by the fuss
I would make because of a suspicion that somebody had touched my
sacrosanct pen of authorship, I would have never deigned as much as the
contemptuous smile of unbelief. There are imaginings too unlikely for
any kind of notice, too wild for indulgence itself, too absurd for a
smile. Perhaps, had that seer of the future been a friend, I should have
been secretly saddened. "Alas!" I would have thought, looking at him
with an unmoved face, "the poor fellow is going mad."

I would have been, without doubt, saddened; for in this world where the
journalists read the signs of the sky, and the wind of heaven itself,
blowing where it listeth, does so under the prophetical management of
the Meteorological Office, but where the secret of human hearts cannot
be captured either by prying or praying, it was infinitely more likely
that the sanest of my friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness
than that I should turn into a writer of tales.