stream with “Floy,” his sister’s _nom-de-plume_, painted on the bows. Against this caricature of himself Willis made no public protest. When a man is wounded in the house of his friends, his only refuge is silence. But in private and to his intimates he asserted that the attack upon him in “Ruth Hall” was most unfair; that he _had_ helped his sister in the early days of her widowhood, but that after her second marriage and divorce he had ceased to have any communication with her, and felt justified in letting her alone. Willis was doubtless a man who took his responsibilities lightly. But had he felt called upon to do his utmost for Fanny Fern, even to the end, it is easy to see how his hands were tied in various ways. He had an expensive family of his own, whose support depended upon his pen. His home on the Hudson had been purchased with his wife’s inheritance. As to paying his sister for articles in the “Home Journal,” supposing them to have been otherwise acceptable, the editors were constantly reiterating that the paper did not, as a rule, pay its contributors anything, and could not afford to do so. It paid its own editorial staff, and that was all. Contributors were glad to write for it for the pleasure of seeing themselves in print. Willis continued to put forth permutations and combinations of old matter under new titles, as long as his books would sell. “Fun Jottings,” “Ephemera,” “Famous Persons and Places,” and “The Rag-Bag” were all made up from the contents of previous volumes, or the teeming sheets of the “Mirror” and “Home Journal.” But in 1857 he published something new, “Paul Fane,” his only novel, and the only book which he wrote as a book, and not as one or more contributions to periodicals. So exclusively a _feuilletoniste_ had he made himself, that any talent for construction on a larger scale which he may once have had was quite frittered away. “It has been with difficult submission to marketableness,” he had written in his preface to “Dashes at Life,” “that the author has broken up his statues at the joints and furnished each fragment with head and legs to walk alone. Continually accumulating material, with the desire to produce a work of fiction, he was as continually tempted by extravagant prices to shape these separate forms of society and character into tales for periodicals; and between two persuaders--the law of copyright, on the one hand, providing that American books at fair prices should compete with books to be had for nothing; and necessity, on the other hand, pleading much more potently than the ambition for an adult stature in literary fame--he has gone on acquiring a habit of dashing off for a magazine any chance view of life that turned up to him, and selling in fragmentary chapters what should have been kept together, and moulded into a proportionate work of imagination.”