Whatever Huxley’s occupation, it turned out that he had at least one book-publishing acquaintance, Mr. Alexander Macmillan, to whom he introduced me next day, for I had brought with me a novel—the great American romance—too good to be wasted on New York, Philadelphia or Boston, but to appear simultaneously in England and the United States, to be translated, of course, into French, Italian and German. This was actually accepted. It was held for final revision. We were to pass the winter in Italy. An event, however, called me suddenly home. Politics and journalism knocked literature sky high, and the novel—it was entitled “One Story’s Good Till Another Is Told”—was laid by and quite forgotten. Some twenty years later, at a moment when I was being lashed from one end of the line to the other, my wife said: “Let us drop the nasty politics and get back to literature.” She had preserved the old manuscript, two thousand pages of it. “Fetch it,” I said. She brought it with effulgent pride. Heavens! The stuff it was! Not a gleam, never a radiance. I had been teaching myself to write—I had been writing for the English market—perpendicular! The Lord has surely been good to me. If the “boys” had ever got a peep at that novel, I had been lost indeed! IV Yea, verily we were in London. Presently Artemus Ward and “the show” arrived in town. He took a lodging over an apothecary’s just across the way from Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where he was to lecture. We had been the best of friends, were near of an age, and only round-the-corner apart we became from the first inseparable. I introduced him to the distinguished scientific set into which chance had thrown me, and he introduced me to a very different set that made a revel of life at the Savage Club. I find by reference to some notes jotted down at the time that the last I saw of him was the evening of the 21st of December, 1866. He had dined with my wife and myself, and, accompanied by Arthur Sketchley, who had dropped in after dinner, he bade us good-by and went for his nightly grind, as he called it. We were booked to take our departure the next morning. His condition was pitiable. He was too feeble to walk alone, and was continually struggling to breathe freely. His surgeon had forbidden the use of wine or liquor of any sort. Instead he drank quantities of water, eating little and taking no exercise at all. Nevertheless, he stuck to his lecture and contrived to keep up appearances before the crowds that flocked to hear him, and even in London his critical state of health was not suspected.