It was a surpassing study of the novelist in the making. J. O’Hara Cosgrave, owner, editor and burden-bearer of the _Wave_, was in his editing more an artist than a man of business. He loved "good stuff"; he could not bear to delete a distinctive piece of work just because the populace would not understand. Norris, then, had a free hand. Whatever his thought of that day, whatever he had seen with the eye of his flash or the eye of his imagination, he might write and print. You began to feel him in the files of the year 1895, by certain distinctive sketches and fragments. You traced his writing week by week until the sketches became "Little Stories of the Pavements." Then longer stories, one every week, even such stories as "The Third Circle," "Miracle Joyeaux," and "The House with the Blinds"; then, finally, a novel, written _feuilleton_ fashion week by week—"Moran of the Lady Letty." A curious circumstance attended the publication of "Moran" in the _Wave_. I discovered it myself during those Tuesday night sessions over the files; and it illustrates how this work was done. He began it in the last weeks of 1897, turning it out and sending it straight to the printer as part of his daily stint. The _Maine_ was blown up February 14, 1898. In the later chapters of "Moran," he introduced the destruction of the _Maine_ as an incident! It was this serial, brought to the attention of _McClure’s Magazine_, which finally drew Frank Norris East. "The studio sketches of a great novelist," Gellett Burgess has called these ventures and fragments. Burgess and I, when the _Wave_ finally died of too much merit, stole into the building by night and took away one set of old files. A harmless theft of sentiment, we told ourselves; for by moral right they belonged to us, the sole survivors in San Francisco of those who had helped make the _Wave_. And, indeed, by this theft we saved them from the great fire of 1906. When we had them safe at home, we spent a night running over them, marveling again at those rough creations of blood and nerve which Norris had made out of that city which was the first love of his wakened intelligence, and in which, so wofully soon afterward, he died.