Magnolia, Massachusetts, and Long Beach, Long Island, where I spent the
following summer. It was first serialized in Harper's Weekly and in the
London Illustrated News, as well as in an Australian newspaper--I forget
which one; and it was published as a completed book in 1896.

I remember concerning it a very becoming despair when, at a certain
moment in it, I began to wonder what I was driving at. I have always had
such moments in my work, and if I cannot fitly boast of them, I can at
least own to them in freedom from the pride that goes before a fall. My
only resource at such times was to keep working; keep beating harder and
harder at the wall which seemed to close me in, till at last I broke
through into the daylight beyond. In this case, I had really such a very
good grip of my characters that I need not have had the usual fear of
their failure to work out their destiny. But even when the thing was done
and I carried the completed manuscript to my dear old friend, the late
Henry Loomis Nelson, then editor of the Weekly, it was in more fear of
his judgment than I cared to show. As often happened with my manuscript
in such exigencies, it seemed to go all to a handful of shrivelled
leaves. When we met again and he accepted it for the Weekly, with a
handclasp of hearty welcome, I could scarcely gasp out my unfeigned
relief. We had talked the scheme of it over together; he had liked the
notion, and he easily made me believe, after my first dismay, that he
liked the result even better.

I myself liked the hero of the tale more than I have liked worthier men,
perhaps because I thought I had achieved in him a true rustic New England
type in contact with urban life under entirely modern conditions. What
seemed to me my esthetic success in him possibly softened me to his
ethical shortcomings; but I do not expect others to share my weakness for
Jeff Durgin, whose strong, rough surname had been waiting for his