It was in 1874, I believe, that the idea first occurred to me of making it the nucleus of a longer story. As the years went on, I jotted down, at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue, that occurred to me—who knows how?—with a transitory suddenness that left me no choice but either to record them then and there, or to abandon them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these random flashes of thought—as being suggested by the book one was reading, or struck out from the ‘flint’ of one’s own mind by the ‘steel’ of a friend’s chance remark—but they had also a way of their own, of occurring, _à propos_ of nothing—specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon, ‘an effect without a cause.’ Such, for example, was the last line of ‘The Hunting of the Snark,’ which came into my head (as I have already related in ‘The Theatre’ for April, 1887) quite suddenly, during a solitary walk: and such, again, have been passages which occurred in _dreams_, and which I cannot trace to any antecedent cause whatever. There are at least _two_ instances of such dream-suggestions in this book—one, my Lady’s remark, ‘it often runs in families, just as a love for pastry does’, at p. 88; the other, Eric Lindon’s _badinage_ about having been in domestic service, at p. 332. And thus it came to pass that I found myself at last in possession of a huge unwieldy mass of litterature—if the reader will kindly excuse the spelling—which only needed stringing together, upon the thread of a consecutive story, to constitute the book I hoped to write. Only! The task, at first, seemed absolutely hopeless, and gave me a far clearer idea, than I ever had before, of the meaning of the word ‘chaos’: and I think it must have been ten years, or more, before I had succeeded in classifying these odds-and-ends sufficiently to see what sort of a story they indicated: for the story had to grow out of the incidents, not the incidents out of the story. I am telling all this, in no spirit of egoism, but because I really believe that some of my readers will be interested in these details of the ‘genesis’ of a book, which looks so simple and straight-forward a matter, when completed, that they might suppose it to have been written straight off, page by page, as one would write a letter, beginning at the beginning and ending at the end. It is, no doubt, _possible_ to write a story in that way: and, if it be not vanity to say so, I believe that I could, myself,—if I were in the unfortunate position (for I do hold it to be a real misfortune) of being obliged to produce a given amount of fiction in a given time,—that I could ‘fulfil my task,’ and produce my ‘tale of bricks,’ as other slaves have done. One thing, at any rate, I could guarantee as to the story so produced—that it should be utterly commonplace, should contain no new ideas whatever, and should be very very weary reading!