The second romance was, I think, better than the first, and its dramatic situations were more picturesque. The reviews averaged better in better places, and may have aroused the prejudices of those who shun books that are countenanced or praised by the literary “high brows.” It sold largely; it enjoyed the glory and the shame of a “best-seller”; but here, I pondered, was the time to quit. Not to shock my “audience,” to use the term of the trade, I resolved to try for more solid ground by paying more attention to characterizations, and cutting down the allowance of blood and thunder. I expected to lose heavily with the public, and I was not disappointed. I crept into the best-selling list, but my sojourn there was brief. It is manifest that people who like shots in the dark will not tamely acquiesce in the mild placing of the villain’s hand upon his hip pocket on the moon-washed terrace. The difference between the actual shot and the mere menace, I could, from personal knowledge, compute in the coin of the Republic. When your name on the bill-board suggests battle, murder, and sudden death, “hair-breadth’scapes, i’ th’ imminent deadly breach,” and that sort of thing, you need not be chagrined if, once inside, the eager throng resents bitterly your perfidy in offering nothing more blood-curdling than the heroine’s demand (the scene being set for five o’clock tea) for another lump of sugar. You may, if you please, leave Hamlet out of his own play; but do not, on peril of your fame, cut out your ghost, or neglect to provide some one to stick a sword into Polonius behind the arras. I can take up that particular book now and prove to any fair-minded man how prettily I could, by injecting a little paprika into my villains, have quadrupled its sale. Having, I hope, some sense of humor, I resolved to bid farewell to cloak and pistols in a farce-comedy, which should be a take-off on my own popular performances. Humor being something that no one should tamper with who is not ready for the gibbet, I was not surprised that many hasty samplers of the book should entirely miss the joke, or that a number of joyless critics should have dismissed it hastily as merely another machine-made romance written for boarding-school girls and the weary commercial traveler yawning in the smoking-car. Yet this book also has been a “best-seller”! I have seen it, within a few weeks, prominently displayed in bookshop windows in half a dozen cities.