My next try was at a joint story--a story written by three girls, myself and two friends. That was in the same year. We really made considerable headway with that story; and had visions of completely finishing it and getting no less a sum than thirty pounds for it. I have a sort of an idea that I supplied most of the framework for the story, and that the elder of my collaborators filled in the millinery and the love-making. But--alas for the futility of human hopes and desires!--that book was destined never to be finished, for I had a violent quarrel with my collaborators, and we have never spoken to each other from that day to this. So came to an untimely end my second serious attempt at writing a book; for the stories that I had written in emulation of Josephine H---- were only short ones, and were mostly unfinished. I wasted a terrible deal of paper between my second try and my seventeenth birthday, and I believe that I was, at that time, one of the most hopeless trials of my father's life. He many times offered to provide me with as much cheap paper as I liked to have; but cheap paper did not satisfy my artistic soul, for I always liked the best of everything. Good paper was my weakness--as it was his--and I used it, or wasted it, which you will, with just the same lavish hand as I had done aforetime. When I was seventeen, I did a skit on a little book called 'How to Live on Sixpence a Day.' It was my first soldier story--excepting the original three soldiers and a pig--and introduced the 'sixpence a day' pamphlet into a smart cavalry regiment, whose officers were in various degrees of debt and difficulty, and every man was a barefaced portrait, without the smallest attempt at concealment of his identity. Eventually this sketch was printed in a York paper, and the honour of seeing myself in print was considered enough reward for me. I, on the contrary, had no such pure love of fame. I had done what I considered a very smart sketch, and I thought it well worth payment of some kind, which it certainly was.