Part 11

You, sir, who re-read “The Newcomes” every year, and you, madam, reverently dusting your Jane Austen,--I am sadder than you can be that my talent is so slender; but is it not a fact that you have watched me at my little tricks on the mimic stage, and been just a little astonished when the sparrow, and not the dove, emerged from the handkerchief? But you prefer the old writers; and so, dear friends, do I!

Having, as I have confessed, deliberately tried my hand at romance merely to see whether I could swim the moat under a cloud of the enemy’s arrows, and to gain experience in the mechanism of story-writing, I now declare (though with no illusion as to the importance of the statement) that I have hung my sword over the fireplace; that I shall not again thunder upon the tavern door at midnight; that not much fine gold could tempt me to seek, by means however praiseworthy, to bring that girl with the blue parasol to a proper appreciation of the young gentleman with the suit-case, who even now is pursuing her through the wood to restore her lost handkerchief. It has been pleasant to follow the bright guidon of romance; even now, from the window of the tall office-building in which I close these reflections, I can hear the bugles blowing and look upon

“Strangest skies and unbeholden seas.”

But I feel reasonably safe from temptation. Little that men do is, I hope, alien to me; and the life that surges round me, and whose sounds rise from the asphalt below, or the hurrying feet on the tiles in my own corridor of this steel-boned tower,--the faint tinkle of telephones, the click of elevator doors,--these things, and the things they stand for, speak with deep and thrilling eloquence; and he who would serve best the literature of his time and country will not ignore them.

THE END

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A

FOOTNOTE:

[1] “Heckling the Church,” _The Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1911.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.