Produced by Al Haines. *THE THIRD CIRCLE* BY FRANK NORRIS AUTHOR OF "THE PIT," "THE OCTOPUS," ETC. INTRODUCTION BY WILL IRWIN LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY 1909 CHEAP EDITION _Printed from electrotype plates by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London._ _*TABLE OF CONTENTS*_ The Third Circle The House With the Blinds Little Dramas of the Curbstone Shorty Stack, Pugilist The Strangest Thing A Reversion to Type "Boom" The Dis-Associated Charities Son of a Sheik A Defense of the Flag Toppan A Caged Lion "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" Dying Fires Grettir at Drangey The Guest of Honour _*Introduction*_ It used to be my duty, as sub editor of the old San Francisco _Wave_, to "put the paper to bed." We were printing a Seattle edition in those days of the Alaskan gold rush; and the last form had to be locked up on Tuesday night, that we might reach the news stands by Friday. Working short-handed, as all small weeklies do, we were everlastingly late with copy or illustrations or advertisements; and that Tuesday usually stretched itself out into Wednesday. Most often, indeed, the foreman and I pounded the last quoin into place at four or five o’clock Wednesday morning and went home with the milk-wagons—to rise at noon and start next week’s paper going. For Yelton, most patient and cheerful of foremen, those Tuesday night sessions meant steady work. I, for my part, had only to confer with him now and then on a "Caption" or to run over a late proof. In the heavy intervals of waiting, I killed time and gained instruction by reading the back files of the _Wave_, and especially that part of the files which preserved the early, prentice work of Frank Norris. He was a hero to us all in those days, as he will ever remain a heroic memory—that unique product of our Western soil, killed, for some hidden purpose of the gods, before the time of full blossom. He had gone East but a year since to publish the earliest in his succession of rugged, virile novels—"Moran of the Lady Letty," "McTeague," "Blix," "A Man’s Woman," "The Octopus," and "The Pit." The East was just beginning to learn that he was great; we had known it long before. With a special interest, then, did I, his humble cub successor as sub editor and sole staff writer, follow that prentice work of his from the period of his first brief sketches, through the period of rough, brilliant short stories hewed out of our life in the Port of Adventures, to the period of that first serial which brought him into his own.