“At about the same time I wrote a volume of verse in a blank book. One selection was this: When I am a lady, a lady I will be a milliner if I can. I’ll have pretty flowers and bonnets and hats And in my store there shall be no mice and rats, When I am a lady. “When I was thirteen I wrote a novel, which almost simultaneously came back to me from a publisher. It was called _A White Dove_, but I do not know what it was about. A few years later I wrote another novel, _Vedita_, of tremendous length--this is easy to remember because of the cost of the type-writing. It was submitted to a Chicago newspaper which was offering a prize for a serial. From that manuscript, which was readily returned, I saved alive the character of Nichola, an old Italian servant, whom I later used in _The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre_. “A short story I first submitted at sixteen--it was called _Both_, was three thousand words long, and I was paid Three Dollars for it by the Milwaukee _Evening Wisconsin_. I had just entered the University at Madison, forty miles from my home, but I traveled the forty miles and came home to show the check, and went back in two hours. Excepting in the Milwaukee and Madison and Wisconsin University newspapers, and one or two evanescent magazines, I never had a story accepted until 1903, though for ten years previous to that acceptance, by _Success Magazine_, I had constantly submitted stories. In 1911 the _Delineator_ gave me a first prize of $2,000 for a short story, _The Ancient Dawn_. In 1904 I began writing stories about Pelleas and Ettarre, two old lovers, and forty of these were published in a dozen magazines, and half were collected in a volume published by the Macmillan Company. These were followed by _Friendship Village_ stories. The first editor to whom these stories were submitted declined them with the word that his acquaintance with small towns was wide but that he had never seen any such people as these. About sixty of these stories have been published serially, the majority of them now collected in four volumes, but I am still not sure that the first editor was not right.