"Why, you see, when you're doing four great stories a week for a public that must have a continuous flow of incident, you can't be quite as original as a strict sense of honour might prompt you to be; and the next best thing you can do, if you haven't got ideas of your own, is to steal other people's ideas in an impartial manner. Don't empty one man's pocket, but take a little bit all round. The combination novel enables a young author to present his public with all the brightest flowers of fiction neatly arranged into every variety of garland. I'm doing a combination novel now--the 'Heart of Midlothian' and the 'Wandering Jew.' You've no idea how admirably the two stories blend. In the first place, I throw my period back into the Middle Ages--there's nothing like the Middle Ages for getting over the difficulties of a story. Good gracious me! why, what is there that isn't possible if you go back to the time of the Plantagenets? I make Jeannie Deans a dumb girl,--there's twice the interest in her if you make her dumb,--and I give her a goat and a tambourine, because, you see, the artist likes that sort of thing for his illustrations. I think you'd admit that I've very much improved upon Sir Walter Scott--a delightful writer, I allow, but decidedly a failure in penny numbers--if you were to run your eye over the story, George; there's only seventy-eight numbers out yet, but you'll be able to judge of the plot. Of course I don't make Aureola,--I call my Jeannie 'Aureola;' rather a fine name, isn't it? and entirely my own invention,--of course I don't make Aureola walk from Edinburgh to London. What would be the good of that? why, anybody _could_ walk it if they only took long enough about it. I make her walk from London to ROME, to get a Papal Bull for the release of her sister from the Tower of London. That's something like a walk, I flatter myself; over the Alps--which admits of Aureola's getting buried in the snow, and dug out again by a Mount St. Bernard's dog; and then walled up alive by the monks because they suspect her of being friendly to the Lollards; and dug out again by Cæsar Borgia, who happens to be travelling that way, and asks a night's lodging, and heard Aureola's tambourine behind the stone wall in his bedroom, and digs her out and falls in love with her; and she escapes from his persecution out of a window, and lets herself down the side of the mountain by means of her gauze scarf, and dances her way to Rome, and obtains an audience of the Pope, and gets mixed up with the Jesuits:--and that's where I work into the 'Wandering Jew,'" concluded Mr. Smith. George Gilbert ventured to suggest that in the days when the Plantagenet ruled our happy isle, Ignatius Loyola had not yet founded his wonderful brotherhood; but Mr. Smith acknowledged this prosaic suggestion with a smile of supreme contempt. "Oh, if you tie me down to facts," he said, "I can't write at all." "But you like writing?"