Now I was ready to write my book. Of course while I was doing this I must keep the wolf from the door, and it was not so easy in the year 1893 for a stray journalist in Paris to get out of the distracted American market orders or pay for orders. The depression of the nineties, now in its third year with five years more to go, was working havoc everywhere. It was hard to get your money even if your debtors consented you had earned it. I was depending at the moment largely upon the new magazine, _McClure’s_. It had started in the summer of 1893, an undertaking which only the young and innocent and the hopelessly optimistic would ever have dared. It has always been a marvel to me that Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips were able to hold on through that dreadful year; but they did, and with a resourcefulness, even gaiety, that nobody but those who saw it can appreciate. I knew perfectly well that if the magazine lived I should get all the money I earned, but in the summer of 1893 they did not have it. It came to a serious pass with me, a point where I did not have a sou or anybody to whom I could confide my predicament. Not for the world would I have told my devoted Madame Marillier that there was no money in my purse; not for the world would I have confided it to Madame A; and, as for the Americans on the scene, I was bent on impressing them with the fact I was really getting on. At all events it must not go back to Titusville or Meadville, Pennsylvania, that this questionable venture of mine had brought me so low. And so one warm summer day I took my sealskin coat, which really was a very good one quite out of keeping with the rest of my wardrobe—by this time close to scandalous—I took the coat and marched over town to the Mont de Piété. They were polite to me; but I was a foreigner, that coat might be stolen, probably was. What credentials did I have, whom could I give as reference? There was nobody in the town that I was willing to have know what I was doing. But did I have documents to prove my identity? Yes, I said, I had; and I would bring them. So I left my coat and raced back to the Left Bank for my credentials. And what were they? What did I have? There were letters from my publishers; there was my checkbook—exhausted but nevertheless a checkbook. Without thinking it would be of any particular use I took my Allegheny College diploma. The inspector passed lightly over the letters of editors, the stubs in my checkbook, but the diploma impressed him; and so it was on my Allegheny College diploma I made the loan which helped me over the bad months of 1893 while I was waiting for a check from a land in the grip of one of the most serious money famines that it had ever known.