"Stop it," said Sala, his Portuguese eyes fairly boring through me. "Stop it. Whist means cards, and cards mean gambling. Stop it." After a pause, "What are the other pleasures?" If whist meant gambling, I reasoned that tobacco must premise opium. However, I admitted that I liked tobacco. "Not strange--not strange," said Sala. "One who writes needs a smoke. What else? Are you a woman-hater?" "No, sir, I'm not," I replied most emphatically. Sala looked at me queerly, but did not pursue the subject. I had been introduced to him by a man who, wrongly or rightly, had the reputation of saying cross things about women. "Do you drink?" Sala continued in a moment. "Yes, when I feel like it." "_Stop it, stop it._ Drinking means boozing, boozing means busting, and busting means hell--hell, young man, remember that." There was a pause, during which Sala looked out of the window as if he had taken my pulse and was deciding how much faster it could beat before I must die. Pretty soon he turned my way, and, after some general advice about coming to an early decision as to whether I meant to be a purely descriptive writer or not, delivered himself to this statement: "If you settle in London as a journalist, you'll be a drudge. If you try New York, you'll be a boozer--_unless_," and again the Portuguese eyes shot at me, "_you keep out of the rut_." In reviewing my past experiences I have often thought of this talk with Sala when comparing the two different sets of writers I learned to know in London and New York. Offhand I should say that honors were even between them as regards the virtues, any advantage in this particular falling, if there was any, to the Englishmen on account of the early closing hours in England. It was after the celebrated closing hours that Symons and I often had some of our most entertaining strolls. Symons was inveterately on the scent for "impressions and sensations," while I found happiness merely in roving. I suppose that I received impressions and sensations of their kind just as well as Symons did, but somehow when I began to describe them they did not seem to have enough literary dignity to belong in the same class with those that Symons could tell about and later describe in print. One night, we separated, each to wander as long as he was interested, and in the morning to compare reports. It so happened that neither of us on this particular occasion saw enough that we had not enjoyed together on other jaunts, to make the undertaking very amusing. But we both agreed that such explorations could be made uncommonly entertaining by a literary artist, if he would honestly tell what he had stumbled upon.