James has acquired his extraordinarily brilliant style at the expense of incessant and determined effort. The dazzling spontaneities are really the product of toilsome hours. He works mostly in the morning, writing slowly, and his stories are written again and again before they go off to his publisher's. With him writing is a profession, a task; he is not the child of moods. Occasionally he visits friends--old friends, like Marion Crawford--but the greater part of the year he spends quietly and almost reclusely in England. [Illustration: Photo by Parker, Morristown. FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON.] FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON At a dinner given in honour of Mr. Frank R. Stockton by the Author's Club of New York, early in the year 1901, Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the Editor of _The Century_, is reported to have told the following story: "A young man once came to me and said that he would like to contribute to _The Century_ every month. I asked him what he wanted to write. 'Oh,' he said, 'I'd like to send you each month a story like "The Lady or the Tiger?"'" Mr. Gilder, we are told, said at the end of his speech that night: "When I think of the immense amount of pleasure Mr. Stockton brought into the life of Stevenson it seems to me that alone would be to him a benediction forever." The Editor of _The Century_ thus happily illustrated the attitude of the reading world toward Mr. Stockton: on one side is an eager desire to emulate him, and on the other an equally eager desire to go to him for pleasure or for comfort. There is a natural grace about his stories which has often deceived the inexpert into an attempt to rival him, while the sweet and simple comedy of the stories has for more than a quarter of a century been the delight of young and old. The young man who visited Mr. Gilder, and the brilliant novelist solacing himself with the acquaintance of Pomona, Ardis Claverden, Mrs. Null, and Chipperton, are types. The object of this variety of admiration was born in Philadelphia on April 5, 1834. He belongs to the Stockton family of New Jersey, but not, he has informed us, to the Princeton branch. His father, William S. Stockton, was a well-known writer on church government.