I have generally worked myself into a perfect fever of anxiety by the day of publication, and even when those kindly, delightful reviews have appeared, my misery has not abated. Treated more than generously by both critic and public, I have naught to complain of. I have made far more money by my pen than I ever deserved—three hundred pounds advance on a twenty-five per cent royalty, is “nae so bad,” as our Northern friends would say. Columns of excellent reviews have appeared in the best papers of many lands. Yet I know the anxiety of it all, the rejection of articles, the return of “copy” from magazines, the weary, weary waiting when weeks seem years, after one has worked at break-neck speed; and although literature—no, I must not call anything I have done by such a stupendous name—although writing is a feverish joy, it is generally ill-paid, and the greater the rubbish, the more money it brings in. It certainly has done so in everything I have written. Serious work receives the least remuneration. Major Martin Hume and other kind critics have told me I have “written two books that will live.” All I can say is those books (the last two on the list) have cost me ten times the work for less reward and much less public acknowledgment than the others. Serious work may live, but it seldom pays. Rubbish may pay, but it never lives. Here is the list of thirteen books—the children of my pen—and various editions and translations of these have been published. But the newspaper and magazine articles number thousands, they cannot be counted. _A Girl’s Ride in Iceland._ _The Oberammergau Passion Play._ (Out of print.) _A Winter Jaunt to Norway._ _Wilton, Q.C., or Life in a Highland Shooting Box._ (Out of print.) _Danish versus English Butter-making._ _Through Finland in Carts._ _The First College for Women._ (Out of print.) _George Harley, or the Life of a London Physician._ _Mexico as I saw It._ _Behind the Footlights._ _Sunny Sicily._ _Porfirio Diaz, Seven Times President of Mexico._ _Hyde Park, Its History and Romance._ So many people have asked me how a writer works or plans out a day, that a sketch of an ordinary writer’s ordinary day may be of interest. For years I have been called with a cup of tea at seven o’clock. Between then and getting up, thoughts have chased one another in quick succession. As a composer composes without a piano, so a writer writes without a pen. It is the thinking that does it. The arranging of facts and settling the sequence of events. It is the length of a book that wears one out, the necessity of keeping up the interest and working up to some definite end. Breakfast at half-past eight, and a glance at the papers. To the kitchen as the clock struck nine, and then, every order given for the day, the flowers arranged, and so on. Nine-thirty heralded the arrival of my secretary, and from then till luncheon I was a hard-working woman. After luncheon, I could afford to be a “laidy,” not before.