subconscious, and the material labour of execution amounts to little more than mere copying. I have seen a writer hesitate to correct his spontaneous composition for fear of marring the tone. He was aware that the state in which he corrected would be quite different from that in which he had written, and in which he had, at the same time, conceived his work. Often a word overheard, an attitude caught sight of, a singular individual passed in the street, gave him the sole suggestion for his tales, which he improvised in three or four hours. If he attempted to follow a preconceived plan, he almost always abandoned it after the first page, and finished his story in accordance with a new logic, reaching a conclusion quite different from that which had seemed best to him when he began. Some of these plans had been drafted under so strong a subconscious influence, that later he no longer understood them, recognized them only by the writing, and was able to determine their date only by the kind of paper he had used, and by the colour of the ink. On the contrary, other projects (for longer works) recurred to him quite frequently. He was conscious of thinking of them several times a day, and was convinced that it was these reveries, even when vague and inconsistent, that rendered the work of execution comparatively easy. In fact, I have never seen him seriously preoccupied with regard to works which were, however, supposed to be the result of a rather arduous effort. He never spoke of them, and I believe firmly that he never gave them a conscious thought till the moment when he wrote the terrible first lines. But, once the work was under way, almost all his intellectual life concentrated on it, the periods of subconscious rumination perpetually returning to join those of voluntary meditation.