And then, while I yet waited in suspense, I heard the sound of footsteps and knew that my cousin was returning. In a flash I realised how stupid I had been to remain in the room, when I might have hidden myself in some far corner of the attic and appeared no more until my shame had been forgotten. My legs trembled in sudden panic, and it seemed to me that my face was ticking like a clock. I received my first critic with my head buried in the cushions of the sofa. Looking back, I perceive that the Olympians rose to the occasion, but at the time I could hardly believe my good-fortune. Long after my cousin had gone away I lay on the sofa turning over the pleasant message in my mind—and the magic half-crown in my hand. Praise I had desired, if not expected; but that the Olympians—whose function in life was to divert our tips into a savings-bank account that meant nothing to us, that these stern financiers should give me a whole half-crown in one sum, unhindered by any restrictions in the spending, was incredible. Yet I could feel its rough edge in the dark; and considering its source, I formed an erroneous idea of the influence of the arts on the minds of sane grown-up people, from which even now I am not wholly delivered. After a while, with a mind strangely confused between pride and modesty, I stole into the room where the others were sitting. But with a quick sense of disappointment I saw that I need not have concerned myself at all with the proper attitude for a young poet to adopt. The Olympians, engaged in one of their meaningless discussions, did not notice my entrance, and only my brothers were interested when I crept silently into their midst. “What are you going to spend it on?” they whispered. Oddly, for I was the youngest of four, this success of mine was responsible for a literary outburst in our normally uncultured schoolroom, and one of the fruits of that intellectual disturbance, in the shape of a manuscript magazine, lies before me. It contains an editorial address to the “friendly reader,” two short stories full of murders, a quantity of didactic verse, and the first instalment of a serial, which commences gravely: “My father was a bootmaker of considerable richness.” Of literary achievement or even promise it would be hard to find a trace in these yellowing pages, but there is an enthusiasm behind every line of them that the critic would seek in vain in modern journalism. Indeed, those were the days in which to write, when paper and pencil and half an hour never failed to produce a masterpiece, and the finished work invariably thrilled the artist with “out-landish pride.” I cannot recall that any further half-crowns rewarded our efforts, and possibly that is the reason why three of the four boys who wrote that magazine are now regenerate and write no more.