Getting the work into print was not so easy as the eager praises of my small audience might have inclined me to expect. The principal book-store in Richmond at that time was owned by Adolphus Morris, a warm personal friend of my father. The two had been intimate for years, and the families of the friends maintained most cordial relations. Yet it was with sore and palpable quakings of heart that I betook myself to the office of the man who took on dignity as a prospective publisher, and laid bare my project. It was positive _pain_ to tell him that I had been writing under divers signatures for the press since I was fourteen. The task grew harder as the judicial look, I have learned to know since as the publisher’s perfunctory guise, crept over the handsome face. When I owned, with blushes that scorched my hair, to the authorship of the “Robert Remer” series, and of the prize story in the _Era_, he said frankly and coolly that he “had never read either.” He “fancied that he had heard Mrs. Morris speak of the Remer papers. Religious—were they not?” He liked me, and his pretty wife (who had far more brains and vivacity than he) had made a pet of me. He honored my father, and was under business obligations to him. I was conscious, while I labored away at my share in my first business interview, that he lent kindly heed to me for these reasons, and not that he had the smallest grain of faith in the merits of my work. I was a child in his sight, and he would humor my whim. “I am willing to submit your manuscript to my reader,” he said, at last. I looked the blank ignorance I felt. He explained patronizingly. He had patronized me from the moment I said that I had written a book. I have become familiar with this phase of publisherhood, also, since that awful day. “John R. T. reads all my manuscripts!” fell upon my ear like a trickle of boiling lead. “Send it down when it is ready, and I will put it into his hands. You know, I suppose, that everything intended for printing must be written on one side of the paper?” I answered meekly that I had heard as much, bade him “Good morning!” and crept homeward, humbled to the dust. “John R. T.!” (Nobody ever left out the “R.” in speaking of him, and nobody, so far as I ever heard, knew for what it stood.) He was the bright son of a worthy citizen; had been graduated at the University of Virginia; studied _at_ the law, and entered the editorial profession as manager-in-chief, etc., of the _Southern Literary Messenger_. He had social ambitions, and had succeeded in acquiring a sort of world-weary air, and a gentle languor of tone and bearing which might have been copied from D’Israeli’s _Young Duke_, a book in high favor in aristocratic circles. I never saw “Johnny”—as graceless youths who went to school with him grieved him to the heart by calling him on the street—without thinking of the novel. Like most caricatures, the likeness was unmistakable.