I have headed this article “An Author’s Post-Bag” et cetera. Probably you will be wondering when I am going to justify the title. I will begin to do so now. Post-time is always a recurring wonder to me. The lowest classes of all, the people who don’t get letters, are incapable of experiencing more than a third of the sensations which the highly-organized life of our time has to offer us. A novelist, and I have no reason to think that I am any exception to the rule, receives a very varied correspondence. The business side of his operations is more extensive than the layman would suppose. The writer whose output is regular and whose work is in demand has an almost daily letter to receive from his agent. There is the question of a serial for this or that paper, an editor wants a short story, a publisher is writing impatient letters to the agent for a book that is overdue, “close times” for various books have to be arranged so that they do not clash between various publishers--he is confronted every day with an infinity of detail which even such an experienced and assiduous agent as I myself am fortunate to possess cannot save him. When the business letters have been read, there is his own private correspondence, and then the great mass of communications from people whom one has never heard of and never seen. It is of these letters that I would speak, and of their varied appeals to one’s pocket, one’s vanity, the sense of gratitude and the feeling of anger. As Cowper said, “None but an author knows an author’s cares,” and not the least of them is the number of letters he receives asking for money. There is a rooted idea in the general mind that fame and fortune come immediately a writer publishes his first book. A novelist is popularly supposed to be a man of affluence in the twentieth century, just as in the eighteenth century he was known to be a pauper. “All the vices of the gambler and of the beggar were blended with those of the author. The prizes in the wretched lottery of bookmaking were scarcely less ruinous than the blanks. If good fortune came, it came in such a manner that it was almost certain to be abused. After months of starvation and despair, a full third night or a well-received dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged, unwashed poet with guineas.... A week of taverns soon qualified him for another year of night cellars.” Well, we have progressed since then certainly. There are beds to sleep in, food to eat and fire upon the hearth for most of us. Nevertheless the ordinary novelist is nearly always a poor man, sometimes bitter poor. I _know_ what I am talking about and there is not an author, agent or publisher who would not say the same. For the first book I ever wrote I received ten pounds, and this was paid in two instalments. Until four years ago thirty pounds was the largest sum I had received for a long novel.