elimination. If he wished to describe an automobile turning
in at a gate, he made first a long and elaborate description
from which there was omitted no detail, which the most
observant pair of eyes in Christendom had ever noted with
reference to just such a turning. Thereupon he would begin a
process of omitting one by one those details which he had
been at such pains to recall; and after each omission he
would ask himself: "Does the picture remain?" If it did not,
he restored the detail which he had just omitted, and
experimented with the sacrifice of some other, and so on, and
so on, until after Herculean labor there remained for the
reader one of those swiftly flashed, ice-clear pictures
(complete in every detail) with which his tales and romances
are so delightfully and continuously adorned.

But it is quarter to eleven, and, this being a time of
holiday, R. H. D. emerges from his workroom happy to think
that he has placed one hundred and seven words between
himself and the wolf who hangs about every writer's door. He
isn't satisfied with those hundred and seven words. He never
was in the least satisfied with anything that he wrote, but
he has searched his mind and his conscience and he believes
that under the circumstances they are the very best that he
can do. Anyway, they can stand in their present order until--
after lunch.

A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death
he had denied himself the luxury and slothfulness of habits.
I have never seen him smoke automatically as most men do. He
had too much respect for his own powers of enjoyment and for