In 1885, after I had been a year in London, the fact that a journalist friend of mine got two hundred and fifty dollars from the _Weekly Echo_ for a serial story, based upon his own observations as a youngster in Ireland, gave me a new idea. He seemed to make his book with extreme facility, never touching the weekly instalment until the day for sending it to the printer’s had arrived, and then walking up and down dictating the new chapters in a very loud voice, to drown the racket of his secretary’s typewriter. This appeared to be a highly simple way of earning two hundred and fifty dollars, and I went home to start a story of my own at once. When I had written the opening chapter, I took it to the editor of the _Weekly Echo_, who happened to be a friend of mine as well. He read it, suggested the word “comely” instead of some other on the first page, and said it was too American for any English paper, but might do well in America. The fading away of the two hundred and fifty dollars depressed me a good deal, but after a time a helpful reaction came. I realized that I had consumed nearly ten years in fruitless mooning over my Revolutionary novel, and was no nearer achievement than at the outset, simply because I did not know how to make a book of any kind, let alone a historical book of the kind which should be the most difficult and exacting of all. This determined me to proceed with the contemporary story I had begun--if only to learn what it was really like to cover a whole canvas. The result was “Seth’s Brother’s Wife”--which still has the _Echo_ man’s suggested “comely” in its opening description of the barn-yard. At the time, I thought of this novel almost wholly in the light of preparation for the bigger task I had to do, and it is still easiest for me to so regard it. Certainly its completion, and perhaps still more the praise which was given to it by those who first saw it, gave me a degree of confidence that I had mastered the art of fiction which I look back upon now with surprise--and not a little envy. It was in the fine flush of this confidence that I hastened to take up the real work, the book I had been dreaming of so long, and, despite the immense amount of material in the shape of notes, cross-references, dates, maps, biographical facts, and the like, which I had perforce to drag along with me, my ardor maintained itself to the finish. “In the Valley” was written in eight months--and that, too, at a time when I had also a great deal of newspaper work to do as well.