Wolff Mason sighed as he thought of his daughters. The two elder ones were married and settled, very comfortably, it is true; but if Ida followed their example, what on earth was to become of her unfortunate father? Who was to typewrite his manuscript, and correct his proofs, and peel the stamps from the enclosed envelopes of the people who wrote for the novelist's autograph? No, he could not do without Ida at any price; and Mr. Mason shook his head as he passed out into the fresh air and down the iron steps into the garden. He did more: he shook his daughters, and all creatures of mere flesh and blood, quite out of his mind. For it was Wolff Mason's habit to spend five minutes in the garden, every morning before breakfast, when it was fine; and when it was not, to walk round the breakfast table four-and-twenty times. That filled the five minutes which he always spent in the exclusive company of the characters of his current novel. He had been heard to say that he did his day's work in those five minutes; that at the office, where he worked at his novel all the morning, he had only to sit with his pen in his hand for three hours, and fifteen hundred words of fiction was the inevitable result. That part was purely mechanical, the novelist said. He had really written it in the five minutes before breakfast. It is not generally known, however, how curiously Wolff Mason delighted in humorous depreciation of his own work and methods. One would have liked his critics to hear him on the subject; they took his writings so very much more seriously than he did himself, that they little dreamt how highly their clever elaborate reviews entertained the philosophic object of their censure. It was an open secret that Wolff Mason professed a wholesome and unaffected disregard for posterity and the critics; but if the books that delighted two generations are forgotten by a third, their writer will certainly be remembered as the most charming talker, the kindest-hearted editor, and the most methodical man of letters of his day.