Wallace reassured me, however. He said that he never went back on a bargain, and when I pointed out to him that no bargain had been made as yet, he promised to call at the office next day and discuss terms with the partners. On my recommendation, the terms offered were amazingly liberal for a first novel; but my enthusiasm was powerful enough for once to overcome the awful inertia of old Hallows. (He had been in the publishing business for thirty years, and his one idea was to buy as cheaply as he could. He had no conception of what Rice and myself understood by “enterprise.”) The firm even went so far as to offer to pay a proportion of the “advance” on signing the agreement, but Wallace refused to accept that. He said that it would harass him to feel tied; and he would not promise any particular date for the delivery of the manuscript. “I’ve nearly finished the book,” he told us, “but when it’s written, I want to put it away for three months and then go right through it again with a fresh mind. I mean this book to be a classic.” Old Hallows was tremendously impressed, I remember, and congratulated me on having made “a real find.” After that agreement was signed I no longer felt it necessary to hold my tongue about the book, and I dropped a hint or two here and there as to what might be expected when it was published. I cannot believe, however, that I was the chief instigator of the steadily growing interest that was being aroused by the promise of Wallace’s novel. No doubt both old Hallows and Rice made occasional references in public to the same subject, but I fancy that Wallace himself was the really active propagandist. In any case, one was continually finding references to _As the Crow Flies_ in the Press that spring, even the name of Joseph Blake was sometimes referred to as an exemplar of the British character. The book was asked for at the libraries, and I more than once met people who declared that they had read it. At the office we had decided to print a first edition of 20,000 copies, and we put a note about it in our autumn list. Wallace assured me that summer (1899) that the thing was done and only needed a final revision. “If I died tomorrow,” he said, “the story is all there ready to be published, but there is an incident or two that I want to alter before I send it along to you. I mean to deliver you a perfect manuscript. I sha’n’t touch the thing in proof.” And then, of course, we did not press him for delivery in the autumn of that year. We should not, in any case, have published so important a book during the first months of the Boer war. And in the following spring Wallace himself went out to South Africa. I did not see him before he went. In fact, I did not know he had enlisted until I saw a reference to the fact in the “literary notes” that were just beginning to break out again in the daily and weekly papers.