Translation of a Savage' at Hampstead, my letters were only delivered to
me once a week. I saw no friends, for no one knew where I was; but I
walked the heights, I practised with my golf clubs on the Heath, and I
sat in the early autumn evenings looking out at London in that agony of
energy which its myriad lives represented. It was a good time.

The story had a basis of fact; the main incident was true. It happened,
however, in Michigan rather than in Canada; but I placed the incident in
Canada where it was just as true to the life. I was living in
Hertfordshire at the time of writing the story, and that is why the
English scenes were worked out in Hertfordshire and in London. When I
had finished the tale, there came over me suddenly a kind of feeling that
the incident was too bold and maybe too crude to be believed, and I was
almost tempted to consign it to the flames; but the editor of 'The
English Illustrated Magazine', Sir C. Kinloch-Cooke, took a wholly
different view, and eagerly published it. The judgment of the press was
favourable,--highly so--and I was as much surprised as pleased when Mr.
George Moore, in the Hogarth Club one night, in 1894, said to me: "There
is a really remarkable play in that book of yours, 'The Translation, of a
Savage'." I had not thought up to that time that my work was of the kind
which would appeal to George Moore, but he was always making discoveries.
Meeting him in Pall Mall one day, he said to me: "My dear fellow, I have
made a great discovery. I have been reading the Old Testament. It is
magnificent. In the mass of its incoherence it has a series of the most
marvellous stories. Do you remember--" etc. Then he came home and had
tea with me, revelling, in the meantime, on having discovered the Bible!

I cannot feel that 'The Translation of a Savage' has any significance
beyond the truthfulness with which I believe it describes the
transformation, or rather the evolution, of a primitive character into a