a writer who has the reputation of being able to tell you something different each time, because, of course, you never know what he or she may be at. You may have your very soul racked by painful or pathetic surprises--and why should we have our souls racked? The persistently "original" man may take us to the brink of a hell and force us to look down when we would rather not; he may suddenly exert all his forces to drag our leaden minds after him up to a heaven where we are not quite ready to go. Then, again, he may give us descriptions of human passion such as will make us grow quite hot and anon quite cold with the most curious feelings; what have we done that we should be afflicted with literary ague? No; it is better, it is safer, to have our novelists all arranged in "grooves" or "sets" ready to hand, so that we shall know exactly where to find the chroniclers of rural stories, sporting stories, detective stories, ghost stories, every "male and female after their kind," each in his or her own appointed place. To get a book by an author who is recognised as a manufacturer of "racing novels," and find him breaking out into a strain of sublimated philosophy, would be indeed an alarming circumstance to most readers. Oh, yes, it is better to be "groovy"; sometimes the public get tired and throw you over, but that sort of thing happens more frequently in restless France and Italy than in England. Had I been "groovy" I should have been famous--at least, so I have been told by a lady skilled in the fashionable science of palmistry. But being unable to play the mill-horse, and go round and round in a recognised rut, here I am--the merest un-notorious Nobody. What a pity! I cannot but heave an involuntary sigh over my lost opportunities. If I had only had the necessary ambition, I could have been made a "Celebrity at Home" for one of the leading journals. "Fancy that!" to quote from the immortal Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler." And then--proud thought!--I should have been a Somebody. Not because I had achieved something--oh, no, that isn't required of a "Celebrity at Home." Not at all. In fact, the less you do nowadays the more likely you are to become a "celebrity" of the newspapers. So that as I have done nothing, and moreover, as I have really nothing to do, I ought, by all modern rule and plan, to be "interviewed" as--well, let me modestly suggest, as a "Coming" person, perhaps? Lots of fellows are "Coming," according to the press, who never arrive. I could be advertised as one of those, without doing much harm to anybody? Won't some one back me up? I am fully aware of the extent of my loss in literature in having failed to find a "groove"--but it's never too late to mend, and perhaps I shall discover it still and settle down in it. At present I am not anxious, because, as far as my observations on the great literary raree-show have gone, I find the chief object of the modern Pen is to earn Money, not Fame.