This seemed good enough for a beginning; but, when I woke up, I was not
long in perceiving that it would require various modifications before
being suitable for a novel; and the first modifications must be in the way
of rendering the plot plausible. What sort of a man, for example, must the
hero be to fall into and remain in such an error regarding the character
of the heroine? He must, I concluded, be a person of great simplicity and
honesty of character, with a strong tinge of ideality and imagination, and
with little or no education.

These considerations indicated a person destitute of known parentage, and
growing up more or less apart from civilization, but possessing by nature
an artistic or poetic temperament. Fore-glimpses of the further
development of the story led me to make him the child of a wealthy English
nobleman, but born in a remote New England village. His artistic
proclivities must be inherited from his father, who was, therefore,
endowed with a talent for amateur sketching in oils; which talent, again,
led him, during his minority, to travel on the continent for purposes of
artistic study. While in Paris, this man, Floyd Vivian, meets a young
Frenchwoman, whom he secretly marries, and with whom he elopes to America.
Then Vivian receives news of his father's death, compelling him to return
to England; and he leaves his wife behind him.

A child (Jack, the hero of the story) is born during his absence, and the
mother dies. Vivian, now Lord Castleman, finds reason to believe that his
wife is dead, but knows nothing of the boy; and he marries again. The boy,
therefore, is left to grow up in the Maine woods, ignorant of his
parentage, but with one or two chances of finding it out hereafter. So
far, so good.