have a sense of humour. I deliberately stifled it. For it I substituted
a grisly kind of playfulness. My hero called my heroine "little woman,"
and the concluding passage where he kissed her was written in a sly,
roguish vein, for which I suppose I shall have to atone in the next
world. Only the editor of the _Colney Hatch Argus_ could have
accepted work like mine. Yet I toiled on.

It was about the middle of my third week at No. 93A that I definitely
decided to throw over my authorities, and work by the light of my own
intelligence.

Nearly all my authorities had been very severe on the practice of
verse-writing. It was, they asserted, what all young beginners tried to
do, and it was the one thing editors would never look at. In the first
ardour of my revolt I determined to do a set of verses.

It happened that the weather had been very bad for the last few days.
After a month and a half of sunshine the rain had suddenly begun to
fall. I took this as my topic. It was raining at the time. I wrote a
satirical poem, full of quaint rhymes.

I had always had rather a turn for serious verse. It struck me that the
rain might be treated poetically as well as satirically. That night I
sent off two sets of verses to a daily and an evening paper. Next day
both were in print, with my initials to them.

I began to see light.

"Verse is the thing," I said. "I will reorganise my campaign. First the
skirmishers, then the real attack. I will peg along with verses till