magazine, used to say to me while the story was in progress, "Keep that
red-haired girl up to the mark, and the story will do." I took a fancy to
Mary Dene myself. But I uniformly prefer my heroines to my heroes; perhaps
because I invent the former out of whole cloth, whereas the latter are
often formed of shreds and patches of men I have met. And I never raised a
character to the position of hero without recognizing in him, before I had
done with him, an egregious ass. Differ as they may in other respects,
they are all brethren in that; and yet I am by no means disposed to take a
Carlylese view of my actual fellow-creatures.

I did some hard work at this time: I remember once writing for twenty-six
consecutive hours without pausing or rising from my chair; and when,
lately, I re-read the story then produced, it seemed quite as good as the
average of my work in that kind. I hasten to add that it has never been
printed in this country: for that matter, not more than half my short
tales have found an American publisher. "Archibald Malmaison" was offered
seven years ago to all the leading publishers in New York and Boston, and
was promptly refused by all. Since its recent appearance here, however, it
has had a circulation larger perhaps than that of all my other stories
combined. But that is one of the accidents that neither author nor
publisher can foresee. It was the horror of "Archibald Malmaison," not any
literary merit, that gave it vogue,--its horror, its strangeness, and its
brevity.

On Guy Fawkes's day, 1880, I began "Fortune's Fool,"--or "Luck," as it was
first called,--and wrote the first ten of the twelve numbers in three
months. I used to sit down to my table at eight o'clock in the evening and
write till sunrise. But the two remaining instalments were not written and
published until 1883, and this delay and its circumstances spoiled the
book. In the interval between beginning and finishing it another long