I read it, sitting on
his mule-trucks, as long as the light lasted, and offered him his own price for
it. He looked over my shoulder for a few pages and said to himself drearily:--
"Now, how in the world did I come to write such damned good stuff as that?"
Then to me:--"Take it and keep it. Write one of your penny-farthing yarns about
its birth. Perhaps--perhaps--the whole business may have been ordained to that
end."
Which, knowing what Wressley of the Foreign Office was once, struck me as about
the bitterest thing that I had ever heard a man say of his own work.
BY WORD OF MOUTH.
Not though you die tonight, O Sweet, and wail,
A spectre at my door,
Shall mortal Fear make Love immortal fail--
I shall but love you more,
Who from Death's house returning, give me still
One moment's comfort in my matchless ill.
--Shadow Houses.
This tale may be explained by those who know how souls are made, and where the
bounds of the Possible are put down. I have lived long enough in this country
to know that it is best to know nothing, and can only write the story as it
happened.
Dumoise was our Civil Surgeon at Meridki, and we called him "Dormouse," because
he was a round little, sleepy little man.
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