His methods of work are particular to himself. It is difficult for a visitor in Hall Caine's house to find pens or ink. As a matter of fact, his writing is done with a stylograph pen, which he always carries in his pocket. "I don't think," he says, "that I have sat down to a desk to write for years. I write in my head to begin with, and the actual writing, which is from memory, is done on any scrap of paper that may come to hand; and I always write on my knee. My work is as follows: I first get my idea, my central moral; and this usually takes me a very long time. The incidents come very quickly, for the invention of incidents is a very easy matter to me. I then labor like mad in getting knowledge. I visit the places I propose to describe. I read every book I can get bearing on my subject. It is elaborate, laborious, but very delightful. I then make voluminous notes. Then begins the agony. Each day it besets me, winter or summer, from five in the morning till breakfast time. I awake at five and lie in bed, thinking out the chapter that is to be written that day, composing it word for word. That usually takes me up till seven. From seven till eight I am engaged in mental revision of the chapter. I then get up and write it down from memory, as fast as ever the pen will flow. The rest of the morning I spend in lounging about, thinking, thinking, thinking of my book. For when I am working on a new book I think of nothing else; everything else comes to a standstill. In the afternoon I walk or ride, thinking, thinking. In the evenings, when it is dark, I walk up and down my room constructing my story. It is then that I am happiest. I do not write every day--sometimes I take a long rest, as I am doing at present--and when I do write, I never exceed fifteen hundred words a day. I do not greatly revise the manuscript for serial publication, but I labor greatly over the proofs of the book, making important changes, taking out, putting in, recasting. Thus, after 'The Scapegoat' had passed through four editions and everybody was praising the book, I felt uneasy because I felt I had not done justice to my subject; so I spent two months in rewriting it and had the book reset and brought out again. The public feeling was that the book had not been improved, but I felt that I had lifted it up fifty per cent." "I am convinced," he continued, "that my system of writing the book in my head first is a good one. It shows me exactly what I want to say. The mental strain is, of course, immense, and that forces you to go straight to your point; for the mind is not strong enough to indulge in flirtations, in excursions at a tangent, as the pen is apt to do."