It follows that the richer an author's experience and the more ardent his imagination the better will be the plot evolved, providing his fine sense of values has been adequately cultivated. But no matter how adventurous and varied a personal experience, or how warm the fancy, or how highly cultivated the mind in its adaptation of fact to fiction, the experience of others compels attention if a writer's work is to be anything more than self-centered. Newspapers, chronicling the everyday events of human existence, have not only suggested countless successful plot-germs but have likewise helped in the rounding out of the plot. An editor wrote Edwards, as long ago as March 30, 1893: "What we require in our stories is something written up to date, with incidents new and original. The daily press is teeming with this raw material." This fact is universally recognized, so that very few authors neglect to avail themselves of this source of inspiration. As a case in point, a few years ago one noted author was accused of appropriating the work of another noted author. Plagiarism was seemingly proved by evoking the aid of the deadly parallel. Nevertheless the evidence was far from being conclusive. Each author had done no more than build a similar story upon the same newspaper clipping! Neither was in the wrong. No one writer has a monopoly of the facts of life, or of the right to use those facts as they filter through columns of the daily press. Fortunately for Edwards, he realized the value of newspaper clippings very early in his writing career. Twenty-five years ago he began to scissor and to put away those clippings which most impressed him. Until late in the year 1893 his clipping collection was either pasted in scrap-books or thrown loosely into a large box. During the winter of 1893-4 he felt the necessity of having the raw material of his Factory stored more systematically. The services of an assistant were secured and the work was begun. Large manila envelopes were used. The envelopes were lettered alphabetically, and each clipping was filed by title. On the back of each envelope was typed the title of its contents. This method was found to be wholly unsatisfactory. Frequent examination had given Edwards a fair working knowledge of his thousands of clippings, but he was often obliged to go through a dozen or more envelopes before finding the particular article whose title had escaped him. In 1905 he bought a loose-leaf book and tried out a new system on an accumulation of several thousand magazines. This indexing was done in such a way as to suggest the character of the clipping (written in red), and the title of the article, the page number and number of the magazine (written in black). All the magazines had been numbered consecutively and placed on convenient shelves. The first page of "W," for instance, appeared as shown below: