week-end, who read me in the smoking-car on his way up into the
country. He burned several holes in my pages with the falling ash of
his cigarettes. He read me in bits between scraps of conversation with
his seat neighbour and recesses of enjoyment of the flying scenery.
And he found it rather awkward holding me balanced on his legs crooked
up against the seat in front of him. This, my precarious position, led
to a grievous calamity. I toppled and fell, and my reader, making a
swooping clutch at me as I went, but the more scattered my pages over
the polluted floor of the car. An evil draught carried my third page
underneath a seat, the third forward from my reader. It was an
anguishing thing, but I could not cry out, I could not tell him: as my
reader, cursing me heartily (for what I cannot admit was my fault)
gathered me up, he neglected to crawl far enough under the seat before
him to perceive my page three.

But it does not fall within the scope of my present design to extend
this chronicle to the length of an autobiography. With what pain and
labour my poor parent recovered from his memory, and then very
imperfectly, of course, my third page; how he grew more melancholy of
countenance at each of my successive returns to the house of my birth
and formative years; how I sometimes remained away for months at a
time, and how once an office boy mis-addressed me to a lady in New
Jersey who very graciously herself forwarded me to my parent; how my
poor parent was obliged at length by the increasing dilapidation of my
appearance to go to the expense of having me completely re-typed by a
public typist, and how directly after this he entirely re-wrote,
expanded, and elaborated me at the instigation of one firm of
publishers; how I was read by a delightful old lady who knitted in her
office as she read; by a lady of cosmopolitan mien who had me together
with many other manuscripts sent to her home in a box, and who consumed