Hamilton was perhaps twenty-one at the time, a trifle younger than myself, at any rate. He came downstairs sometimes to spend the evening in our room. In spite of his stammer and a certain shyness, he was always very welcome. He liked, above all, to listen to weird stories I used to tell, strange, wild, improbable tales akin to ghost-stories. When the Black Mass failed to attract, when Louis was uninspired by absinthe, or when no argument was afoot, such as whether poet or scientist were the highest type of human being, I discovered this taste for spinning yarns, usually of a ghostly character, and found, to my surprise, that my listeners were enthralled. At a moment’s notice, no theme or idea being in my head, I found that I could invent a tale, with beginning, middle and climax. Something in me, doubtless, sought a natural outlet. The stories, at any rate, poured forth endlessly. “May I write that one?” Hamilton would ask. “It’s a corker!” And he would bring his written version to read to us a few evenings later. “It ought to sell,” he said, though I never heard that it did sell actually. Certainly, it never occurred to me that I might write and sell it myself. And Angus Hamilton is mentioned here because it was owing to a chance act of his that I eventually took to writing and so found my liberty. This happened some twelve years later, when I was living in a room in Halsey Street, Chelsea, sweating my life out in the dried milk business and earning barely enough at the job to make both ends meet. A hansom stopped suddenly near me in Piccadilly Circus, its occupant shouted my name, then sprang out--Angus Hamilton. He came round to my room for a talk over old days; he had done well for himself as Reuter’s correspondent in the Manchurian War, had published a book on Korea, and was just off to China, again as Reuter’s agent. He reminded me of the stories I used to tell in the New York boarding-house. I had written some of these, a couple of dozen perhaps, and they lay in a cupboard. Could he see them? Might he take them away and read them?