Nature compensates even her comparative failures by endowing them with a deathless self-conceit. Whalen was a man of small abilities, itching ambition, all the education his brains could stand, and almost happy in being himself and a Whalen. It was true that Fortune had grafted him on a well-nigh sapless branch in a small provincial town, while the family trunk flourished, green, pruned, and portly, in Boston, but no such trifle could alter the fact that he was a Whalen, and destined by a discriminating heredity to add to the small but precious bulk of America’s literature. Although he found Butte a city of some sixty thousand inhabitants, and far better behaved than he had believed could be possible in a community employing some fifteen thousand miners, he was still able to reassure himself that she outraged every sensibility. He assured himself further that its lurid contrasts to the higher civilisation would play like a search-light upon the theme for a novel he long had had in mind: the subtle actions and reactions of the Boston temperament. But that was three years ago, and meanwhile several things had happened to him. He had ceased to wear his spats and silk hat in public after their first appearance on Broadway; the newsboys, who were on strike, had seen to that. He wrote his novel, and the _Atlantic Monthly_, honored by the first place on his list, declined to give space to his innocent plagiarisms of certain anæmic if literary authors now passing into history. An agent sent the manuscript the rounds without avail, but one of the younger editors had suggested that he try his hand at Montana. He was more shocked and mortified at this proposition than at the failure of his novel. Time, however, as well as the high cost of living in Butte, lent him a grudging philosophy, and he digested the advice. But his were not the eyes that see. The printed page was his world, his immediate environment but a caricature of the subtle realities. Nevertheless, he had what so often appears in the most unlikely brains, the story-telling kink. Given an incident he could work it up with an abundance of detail and “psychology,” easily blue-pencilled, and a certain illusion. Condescend to translate his present surroundings into the sacred realm of American fiction he would not, but he picked the brains of old-timers for thrilling incidents of the days when gold was found at the roots of grass, and the pioneers either were terrorized by the lawless element or executed upon it a summary and awful justice. Some of his tales were so blood-curdling, so steeped in gore and horror, that he felt almost alive when writing them. It was true that their market was the Sunday Supplement and the more sensational magazines, whose paper and type made his soul turn green; but the pay was excellent, and they had begun to attract some attention, owing to the contrast between the fierceness of theme and the neat precise English in which it was served. Butte valued him as a