“But to go back. The 2500 have been sold. The extraordinary, the marvellous has been achieved. What does the author get out of it? A royalty of ten per cent. Eighty-three pounds six shillings and eightpence for six months’ hard work. Roughly less than £3 9_s._ 0_d._ a week. An expert carpenter will easily make much more than that, and the carpenter has infinitely the best of it in that he can keep the work up year in and year out, where the novelist must wait for a new idea, and the novel writer must then jockey and manoeuvre for publication. Two novels a year is about as much as the writer can turn out and yet keep a marketable standard. Even admitting that both the novels sell 2500 copies there is only £166 13_s._ 4_d._ of profit. One may well ask the question: Is fiction writing a money-making profession? “The astonishing thing about the affair is that a novel may make a veritable stir, almost a sensation, and yet fail to sell very largely. “There is so-and-so’s book. Everywhere you go you hear about it. Your friends have read it. It is in demand at the libraries. You don’t pick up a paper that does not contain a review of the story in question. It is in the ‘Book of the Month’ column. It is even, even--the pinnacle of achievement--in that shining roster, the list of best sellers of the week. “Why, of course, the author is growing rich! Ah, at last he has arrived! No doubt he will build a country house out of his royalties. Lucky fellow; one envies him. “Catch him unawares and what is he doing? As like as not writing unsigned book reviews at thirty shillings a week in order to pay his lodging bill--and glad of the chance.” This is absolutely and literally true. Yet novelists are perhaps more pestered than any other people by requests for help. A writer who, like myself, can live in fair comfort by means of unceasing labour, but is not even a well-to-do man, to say nothing of a “wealthy one,” receives innumerable letters to which he is quite unable to reply as the applicants would wish, but which are most distressing to read. At a time when I certainly had not a hundred pounds in the world, I received the following letter--of course I suppress the name and address. “---- Vicarage, “----shire. “MY DEAR SIR,