"This is about the worst speculation into which I could possibly put the money. Therefore I am resolved to spend no more upon the matter, whether the novel gets published or not. The magazines pay well, and immediately after publication the cheque is forwarded. It seems the height of absurdity, after receiving a cheque for a magazine article, to go and pay a sum of money just to get your tale in print. I was content to do so the first time, because it is in accordance with the common rule of all trades to pay your footing." The resemblance is not complete, let me say, because the new author, on this theory, would not pay his footing to other authors, but to a publisher, and, besides, such a proposal has never been made to any author. "I might just as well," he concludes, "put the cheque in the fire as print a tale at my own expense." Quite so. Most sensibly put. Young authors will do well to lay this discovery to heart. They may be perfectly certain that a manuscript which respectable firms refuse to publish at their own risk and expense is not worth publishing at all, and they may just as well put their bank-notes upon the fire as pay them to a publisher for producing their works. Nay, much better, because they will thus save themselves an infinite amount of disappointment and humiliation. Before "Restless Human Hearts" is well out of the binder's hands, he is ready--this indefatigable spinner of cobwebs--with another story. It is called "In Summer-Time." He is apparently oblivious of the brave words quoted above, and is now ready to advance L20 towards the risk of the new novel. Nothing came of the proposal, and "In Summer-Time" went to join "Only a Girl." In the same year--this is really a most wonderful record of absolutely wasted energy--he has an allegory written in Bunyanesque English called "The New Pilgrim's Progress; or, A Christian's Painful Passage from the Town of Middle Class to the Golden City." This, too, sinks into oblivion, and is heard of no more. Undeterred by all this ill-success, Jefferies proceeds to write yet another novel, called "World's End." He says that he has spent a whole winter upon it. "The story centres round the great property at Birmingham, considered to be worth four millions, which is without an owner. A year or two ago there was a family council at that city of a hundred claimants from America, Australia, and other places, but it is still in Chancery. This is the core, or kernel, round which the plot develops itself. I think, upon perusal, you would find it a striking book, and full of original ideas." In consideration of the failure of "Restless Human Hearts," he offers his publisher the whole of the first edition for nothing, which seems fair, and one hopes that his publisher recouped by this first edition his previous losses. The reviewers were kinder to "World's End." The _Queen_, the _Graphic_, and the _Spectator_ spoke of it with measured approbation, but no enthusiasm.