My experience with writers may not be conclusive, but it seems to have dawned on me that, the more important a writer is, the more stable and justified his place is in the world of letters, the less eager he is to chatter about his profession. It is the person who has more or less accidentally had one story accepted by _Scribner’s_, _Harpers’_ or the _Century_, or the contributor to some third-rate sectional magazine, who insists upon talking of his “work,” who is forever hinting of the conspiracy among editors and publishers to reject anything unsigned by a well-known name. Real writers usually go about their business calmly, methodically and with little or no enthusiasm. It is rarely writing that they find “delightful and fascinating”; it is the having written. Those I have known intimately have without exception admitted that they could always re-read with interest certain passages from their own books when other diversions failed them, and while they often were conscious of opportunities lost, of having gone astray, of having failed to achieve the effect at which they aimed, they on the other hand were more than compensated by the discovery of certain phrases, paragraphs and whole pages they had almost forgotten and that struck them as being surprisingly skilful. One hears much of the long, discouraging struggle for acceptance and recognition waged by young authors, how their manuscripts are returned unread by the editors of great magazines because their names are unknown, and so on. Having been a reader on a magazine myself, I listen to such tales with an exceedingly skeptical ear. In the United States, at least, it is much more difficult to keep out of print than to get into it. Editors and publishers read, or have their readers read, with the most painstaking care, absolutely everything submitted to them. Not to do so would be fatal; it would incur the risk of missing something, of failing to make the occasional big killing. Being human, they naturally make mistakes they bitterly regret; and it seems to me that this usually happens when the manuscripts sent in have about them a touch of genius. Genius is always somewhat ahead of its time, and publishers are invariably a little afraid of it. They have toward it much the same attitude that a nice old lady might have toward an invitation from Wilbur Wright to take a spin with him in his flying machine. They prefer something more reliable, more within their experience. It is said that Kipling’s “Plain Tales” made the rounds of all our magazines and publishing houses before they found any one sufficiently daring to print them. They were “different,” both in matter and in manner; they were not of the old reliable, tried and true variety; they had about them something very like genius. But it seems incredible that anyone nowadays, who can borrow a respectable plot and unfold it in a style sufficiently lacking in originality, should be