_Guest._ It would be a revelation to the public to be let into the secret of some of our “motives,” and the various ways we have of mingling “poetic-honey” and “trade-wax,” as Tom Hood calls it. The spur of necessity, real or fancied, is often a capital provocation to eloquence. I know a woman who writes verses, who is not only unnecessarily neglectful of worldly interests, but is careless in detail, and self-indulgent and absent-minded. On one occasion, losing quite a sum of money from her pocket-book, and wishing to give herself a lesson to be remembered, she set herself the task of writing certain verses to defray the expenses of her carelessness, as it were. Involuntarily, and yet with a kind of grim fitness in things, the subject that came to hand was, “Losses.” The poem was written and disposed of, and the writer was square with her conscience once more; and the poem was not manifestly worse for having a prosaic prompting behind it. It is well, I think, that the public doesn’t always fathom these little hidden sequences in our logic. [Illustration] _Host._ Speaking of “hidden sequences in logic,” as you call them, reminds me of a story a little girl told me. There was a nest in a tree, and the nest was full of young birds. One very forward one always would sit on the edge of the nest, and had several falls in this way. The old birds picked it up repeatedly, and told it that it would most certainly be caught by cats. After they found that it would not reform, the mother-bird took it by one wing and the father-bird took it by the other, and together they carried it to London, where they left it. I could not imagine why they carried it to London; but a day or two later I discovered that the little girl had been reading the story of Dick Whittington, which was founded on the fact that there were no cats in London. _Guest._ I am constantly surprised at the adroitness children manifest in their little stories. Where does it vanish when they grow older? If almost any child kept up the promise of its story-telling infancy, every grown person would be a clever novelist. But there was a question I had in mind to ask you while we were on the subject of suggestion and plot. Do you ever receive any available ideas from other people? _Host._ Yes, a great many excellent suggestions have come to me from others. But the better they are the less I like to use them, for a good idea deserves hard work, and when the work were done I would not feel that the story were really mine. In a few cases I have used suggestions from other people. For instance, there have been publishers who desired a story written upon a certain incident or idea.