_A Winter’s Jaunt to Norway_ the papers unanimously described as “lively” and “breezy,” and its proud parent began to feel as if she had discovered the home of the winds. A few years later the solid meal followed—the notes were served up as soup, re-served as fish for the papers, and took more solid form as meat for the magazines. Memory was called upon in all kinds of ways and on all kinds of Scandinavian subjects as puddings for the Press, so these little trips for pleasure became invested capital and bore good interest. I became an authority on Northern lands, and for years was written to, or telegraphed to, or ’phoned to for copy on like subjects. I was asked to review somebody else’s Norway book; to join a Norwegian Club; to supply someone with a teacher of Norsk literature, and be interviewed for “galleries” of travellers or sportswomen. One gentleman, whom I unfortunately did not see, but of whose industry I remain an unceasing admirer, wrote an admirable four-column interview with me, entirely from his own imagination. It always pays to master something well, and it is strange how one comes across things again and again through life. When I had been very ill in 1909, and was ordered to Woodhall Spa for a course of baths, the delightful Bath-chair man who conveyed me to the pump-room, suddenly exclaimed, “Excuse me, ma’am, but are you the Mrs. Alec Tweedie that writes?” “Yes,” I replied. “I wondered if you were immediately I heard your name,” he said, “because I owe you a lot, ma’am.” “Owe me?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “seven or eight years ago there was a sale near here and a lot of books were sold. I bought a dozen old copies of _Murray’s Magazine_ for a shilling, and a shilling meant a good deal to me in those days, but reading meant more. In them I read articles by you on Nansen, Björnson, and those Norwegian fellows, and I got so interested in Norwegian literature and the North Pole that I have read everything about them I have been able to lay my hands on ever since. The Squire has been awfully good in lending me his books on Arctic travel, and if it had not been for you I should never have begun to take an interest in such things.” It was really quite touching. How little one knows when one takes up one’s pen what good or ill those inky scratches may do.