My home (or what served for it) was now on the fourth floor of New Court, in Lincoln's Inn, and one morning Lovell came purring and blowing and steaming (the good fellow was a twenty-stone man) into my lofty nest. He had re-read my novel coming up in the train. 'Well?' I asked, nervously. 'It's magnificent,' he said. That was all the favourable criticism he offered. All save one practical and tangible bit. 'We'll give you 100_l._ for the serial right of the story for the _Weekly_'. [Illustration: COMING UP IN THE TRAIN] He offered one unfavourable criticism. 'The death of your hero will never do,' he said. 'If you kill that man Ralph, you'll kill your book. What's the good? Take no more than the public will give you to begin with, and by-and-by they'll take what _you_ give _them_.' It was practical advice, but it went sorely against my grain. The death of the hero was the natural sequel to the story; the only end that gave meaning, and intention, and logic to its _motif_. I had a strong predisposition towards a tragic climax to a serious story. To close a narrative of disastrous events with a happy ending it always seemed necessary to turn every incident into accident. That was like laughing at the reader. Comedy was comedy, but comedy and tragedy together was farce. Then a solemn close was so much more impressive. A happy end nearly always frayed off into rags and nothingness, but a sad one closed and clasped a story as with a clasp. Besides, a tragic end might be a glorious and satisfying one, and need by no means be squalid and miserable. But all these arguments went down before my friend's practical assurance: 'Kill that man, and you kill your book.' With much diffidence I altered the catastrophe and made my hero happy. Then, thinking my work complete, I asked Mr. Theodore Watts (a friend to whose wise counsel I owed much in those days) to read some 'galley' slips of it. He thought the rustic scenes good, but advised me to moderate the dialect, and he propounded to me his well-known views on the use of _patois_ in fiction. 'It gives a sense of reality,' he said, 'and often has the effect of wit, but it must not stand in the way.' The advice was sound. A man may know over much of his subject to write on it properly. I had studied Cumbrian to too much purpose, and did not realise that some of my scenes were like sealed books to the general reader. So once again I ran over my story, taking out some of the 'nobbuts' and the 'dustas' and the 'wiltas.'