The dinner, I repeat, was a very good dinner indeed--the Huxleys, I took it, must be well to do--the company agreeable; a bit pragmatic, however, I thought. The gentleman by the name of Spencer said he loved music and wished to hear Mrs. Watterson sing, especially Longfellow's Rainy Day, and left the others of us--Huxley, Mill, Tyndall and myself--at table. Finding them a little off on the Irish question as well as American affairs, I set them right as to both with much particularity and a great deal of satisfaction to myself. 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.