CHAPTER I.

A PRELIMINARY CONFESSION.


In 1869, when I was about twenty-three years old, I sent a couple of
sonnets to the revived _Putnam's Magazine_. At that period I had no
intention of becoming a professional writer: I was studying civil
engineering at the Polytechnic School in Dresden, Saxony. Years before, I
had received parental warnings--unnecessary, as I thought--against writing
for a living. During the next two years, however, when I was acting as
hydrographic engineer in the New York Dock Department, I amused myself by
writing a short story, called "Love and Counter-Love," which was published
in _Harper's Weekly_, and for which I was paid fifty dollars. "If fifty
dollars can be so easily earned," I thought, "why not go on adding to my
income in this way from time to time?" I was aided and abetted in the idea
by the late Robert Carter, editor of _Appletons' Journal_; and the latter
periodical and _Harper's Magazine_ had the burden, and I the benefit, of
the result. When, in 1872, I was abruptly relieved from my duties in the
Dock Department, I had the alternative of either taking my family down to
Central America to watch me dig a canal, or of attempting to live by my
pen. I bought twelve reams of large letter-paper, and began my first
work,--"Bressant." I finished it in three weeks; but prudent counsellors
advised me that it was too immoral to publish, except in French: so I
recast it, as the phrase is, and, in its chastened state, sent it through
the post to a Boston publisher. It was lost on the way, and has not yet
been found. I was rather pleased than otherwise at this catastrophe; for I
had in those days a strange delight in rewriting my productions: it was,