The author of “The Red Light of Mars” is now in his thirtieth year, having been born on January 7, 1884, in Howard County, Maryland. His father was a Baltimore merchant and insurance broker, who, in his turn, had a Confederate blockade runner for father and an officer in the English army for grandfather. His mother sprang from an old French middle-class family, which had to emigrate from Dijon after the Edict of Nantes. George Bronson-Howard studied in a private school in London, in the public schools of Baltimore, and in the City College of the same place. At fourteen he lost both parents, just as he was about to enter Johns Hopkins University, his age having been carefully concealed in order that the examinations might be open to him. Instead he became a messenger in the Weather Bureau at Baltimore. While thus employed, he submitted successfully to the first of a series of civil service examinations, each one of which required some skilful disingenuousness lest the applicant’s age prove an insuperable obstacle. During the next seven years, Mr. Bronson-Howard busied himself successively as follows: Reporter on the Baltimore _American_; clerk in the office of the Secretary of the Navy; stenographer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; reporter on the Brooklyn _Citizen_; press representative for one of the Frohman theatres and for one of George W. Lederer’s productions; reporter on the New York _Herald_; clerk in the Bureau of Navigation at Washington; clerk in the office of the Collector of Customs at Manila, Philippine Islands; assistant to the Collector of Customs at Iloilo, on the island of Panay; newspaper correspondent at Manila; member of the Philippine Constabulary; contributor of fiction stories to various newspapers and magazines; employé of the Imperial Chinese Customs Service at Canton; agent of the Imperial Chinese Government in Shantung Province; war correspondent for the London _Chronicle_ with the Russian army in Manchuria; magazine and newspaper writer at San Francisco. He was twenty-one when he came East and began to produce a series of clever, quick-moving stories, designated by himself “as melodramatic magazine yarns.” The type of hero around which they were built was wholly new: a secret agent of the State Department. Appearing in book form under the title of “Norroy, Diplomatic Agent,” those stories met with such success that their author found himself relieved for a long time from all necessity of “pot-boiling.”