of what was meant by literary success. That luxurious study, with
its shelves of handsomely-bound books, its beautiful pictures,
its warm, fragrant air--great heavens! what might not a man do
who sat at his ease amid such surroundings!

He began to work at the Reading-room, but at the same time he
thought often of the novelist's suggestion, and before long had
written two or three short stories. No editor would accept them;
but he continued to practise himself in that art, and by degrees
came to fancy that, after all, perhaps he had some talent for
fiction. It was significant, however, that no native impulse had
directed him to novel-writing. His intellectual temper was that
of the student, the scholar, but strongly blended with a love of
independence which had always made him think with distaste of a
teacher's life. The stories he wrote were scraps of immature
psychology--the last thing a magazine would accept from an
unknown man.

His money dwindled, and there came a winter during which he
suffered much from cold and hunger. What a blessed refuge it was,
there under the great dome, when he must else have sat in his
windy garret with the mere pretence of a fire! The Reading-room
was his true home; its warmth enwrapped him kindly; the peculiar
odour of its atmosphere--at first a cause of headache--grew dear
and delightful to him. But he could not sit here until his last
penny should be spent. Something practical must be done, and
practicality was not his strong point.

Friends in London he had none; but for an occasional conversation
with his landlady he would scarcely have spoken a dozen words in