He felt, before his graduation from Annapolis, that his place was at the writing table, not on the deck of a man-o'-war. Apropos of which he has said: "When a man is being trained for a definite career, it helps him to make up his mind as to his tastes and abilities. If he is sure he doesn't want to do that particular thing, he must know pretty definitely what he does want to do. When he throws over a certainty for a chance his heart must be firmly set on the kind of work involved in the chance. For this reason a technical school helps some men to find their vocation better than four years at a university, where the training is general." In 1894 he became editor of the _Army and Navy Journal_. The following year he joined the staff of the _Cosmopolitan_ at Irvington-on-the-Hudson. While working for the magazine he took as wife Miss Mabel Harlakenden Hall of St. Louis, whose fortune induced him to give up magazine work altogether and devote himself to the realization of his dreams. Now if Churchill lacked either determination or genius the wealth that through marriage he became a sharer in would have have availed him little. He might have attracted some attention as a dilettante, or he might have done the things that a wealthy person alone can do--establish another _Anglo-Saxon Review_, for example, or publish small thoughts in editions de luxe. He would have succeeded if his wife had never brought him a copper. It would have taken him longer to succeed, that is all. Art is long, and life is short only to the poor fellow who must ascend the ladder round by round. But not all the money in the world can ease the labor of the brain. Churchill's ambition, from the first moment that he felt the literary impulse, was to write a historical novel. Annapolis had fired his imagination. "Seeing those old houses," he once said, "which used to be the scenes of the gayest and happiest social life before the Revolution--they look as if the people had just gone out of them--and reading the history of the town as it used to be, interested me greatly in a certain aspect of the life of the colonial planters, which had not, it seemed to me, been fully and truthfully expressed in a novel. What I wanted to do in 'Richard Carvel' was to give a picture of the life of colonial Maryland and Virginia, with special reference to Annapolis, and to contrast the people who made it with the corresponding element in England. One of the things I wanted to bring out strongly was that, although the leading men in business, in professional life, and in politics, in both Maryland and London, came from the same stock, a few generations back, politically, the British had sunk into a state of gross corruption and degradation, while the Americans were men of the highest integrity and the cleanest motives, mindful of their legal and moral debt to Great Britain, but resolute not to endure more than a certain amount of injustice."