It had been my habit and delight to spend my evenings composing yarns on my typewriter, finding more pleasure in this than in any dinner engagement, theatre or concert. Why this suddenly began I cannot say, but I guess at a venture that the accumulated horror of the years in New York was seeking expression. Wandering in Richmond Park at night was the only rival entertainment that could tempt me from the joy of typing out some tale or other in solitude. “Jimbo” I had already written twice, several of the “John Silence” tales as well, and numerous other queer ghostly stories of one sort or another. From among these last Hamilton took a dozen or so away with him, but forgot to send them back as he had promised. He had gone to China, I supposed, and the matter had slipped his mind. It didn’t matter much--I went on writing others; the stories were no good to anybody, the important thing being the relief and keen pleasure I found in their expression. But some weeks later a letter came from a publisher: “I have read your book.... My reader tells me ...” this and that “about your stories.... I shall be glad to publish them for you ...,” and then a few words about a title and a request that I would call for an interview. It was some little time before I realized what the publisher was talking about. Hamilton, without asking permission, had sent my stories to him. Eveleigh Nash was the publisher, and his reader at that time was Maude Ffoulkes, who later wrote Lady Cardigan’s Memoirs, numerous other biographies, also “My Own Past,” and to whom I owe an immense debt for unfailing guidance, help and encouragement from that day to this. I never forget my shrinking fear at the idea of appearing in print, my desire to use another name, my feeling that it was all a mistake somewhere, the idea that I should have a book of my own published being too absurd to accept as true. My relief when, eventually, the papers gave it briefest possible mention, a few words of not unkindly praise or blame, I remember too, and my astonishment, some weeks later, to find a column in the _Spectator_, followed not long afterwards by an interesting article in the Literary Page of the _Morning Post_ on the genus “ghost story,” based on my book--by Hilaire Belloc, as he told me years later. All of which prompted me to try another book ... and after the third, “John Silence,” had appeared, to renounce a problematical fortune in dried milk, and with typewriter and kit-bag, to take my precious new liberty out to the Jura Mountains where, at frs. 4.50 a day, I lived in reasonable comfort and wrote more books. I was then thirty-six.