It is conventional to think of writers as eccentric creatures who live apart in a world of their own. I have known many, but I have not found this to be the fact. As a rule I have discovered that the anecdotes about them have been built upon the most slender foundations, either by well-meaning admirers who imagined for them an interesting atmosphere of which they themselves were guiltless, or by malicious gossips who hoped to do them harm. The things printed about writers in newspapers are usually half truths ingeniously distorted, or absolute falsehoods. The actual peculiarities of writers, the little prejudices and habits and superstitions they almost all have to a greater or less degree, rarely find their way into type, because they are so rarely spoken of. One knows, of course, that Fénelon was able to write in comfort only when dressed in court costume, with fine, clean lace falling over his slender, aristocratic hands; that Balzac, in the agonies of composition, consumed quarts of strong coffee and wore a kind of monastic dressing gown; that Dickens always had upon his desk, wherever he went, a little collection of valueless ornaments he was used to seeing there, and without which he felt ill at ease and unable to begin his task; that Thackeray usually hated to write and, as a rule, dragged himself to his pen and ink with extreme repugnance; that Schiller kept in the drawer of his writing table half a dozen rotten apples, the smell of which he inhaled deeply before he was able to compose. Such instances, and hundreds of others, are authentic and historic. They have become known because the writers who were responsible for them are famous the world over, and nothing in their lives seems to be too insignificant to be ferreted out and proclaimed. It is interesting to know that lesser scribes are everywhere, in all sincerity, the victims of much the same whims and unaccountable, innocent manias. A talented and successful woman novelist of my acquaintance once confided in me that she never felt like writing unless her hands were dirty. In winter, before sitting down to write, she always dusts a room, a shelf of books, or builds a fire. In summer she spends half an hour or so pulling up weeds in the garden. Her hands are then dirty and comfortable, and she can write with comparative enjoyment. A man I know, however, always scrubs his hands with hot water and soap before beginning to write, and then squirts a drop or two of cologne on them. This sounds as if he wrote highly romantic fiction or lackadaisical poetry. As a matter of fact, his subjects are history and political economy, and he is regarded as an authority upon those serious matters. But these are queer, intensely personal little traits that emerge diffidently, almost reluctantly, only when one knows a writer very well indeed. They are not the sort of stuff that finds its way into the newspapers.