My little book had no literary value, and the publisher said that only
thirty-nine copies were sold; however, on being asked to produce the
remainder of the edition, he said he was unable to do so, as the copies
had been "mislaid." The printing and binding having been done at my
expense, I compelled the publisher to reprint the book, but this brought
me no pecuniary benefit, as the demand, such as it was, had been
satisfied by the first edition.

To this day I do not feel certain in my own mind whether the publisher
was dishonest or not. It would be quite natural that a book on heraldry
should have a very small sale, but on the other hand it is inconceivable
that more than four hundred copies of a book should have been simply
lost. [Footnote: There is a third possibility: the sale may have been
exactly what the publisher stated; but he may have had no belief in the
success of the work, and have printed only one hundred copies whilst
charging me for five hundred.]

It was a very good thing for me that the printing of this treatise on
heraldry was a cause of loss and disappointment, for if it had been
successful I might easily have wasted my life in archaeology, and
corrected pedigrees--those long lists of dead people of whom nobody
knows anything but their names, and the estates they were lucky enough
to possess.

The reader will see that up to this point my tastes had been
conservative and aristocratic. Then there came a revolution which was
the most important intellectual crisis of my life, and which deserves a
chapter to itself.