And the "galley slaves," those poor devils who for years have lived under the whip of copy day every day. How they dream of the "real" things they might do, given time. If (they think) the Lord would only subsidize them! Now and then the Devil takes one of them and does this very thing. The happy man gets some sort of a sinecure. All he has to do is to go write. And (in all probability) that's all there is to that story. He is like those things Riley tells about who "swaller theirselves." He gets nothing written. What do you write with? And why do you write with whatever it is you write with instead of with something else? Why did Mr. Howells (in all the writing of his which I have seen) use a script-letter typewriter instead of a Roman-letter machine? Why does Mr. Le Gallienne do so much of his copy (if not all of it) by hand? Why is it that Mr. Huneker could never either dictate or learn to run a typewriter? How is it possible for those Englishmen--Swinnerton and Bennett, for instance--to put forth in a few months whole novels in the monkish hand of an illuminated missal? (I have seen the original manuscript of "The Old Wives' Tale," every page like a copper-plate engraving, and hardly a correction throughout.) And why is that it seems to me most natural to write some things with a pen, others with a pencil, most things on a typewriter, and yet again mix the use of all three implements in one composition? I cannot tell you. Some authors, if they are going to write about a slum, have to go and live in a slum while they are writing about a slum. Other authors, if they are going to write about life in an Ohio town, go to Italy to write about life in an Ohio town. In his excellent book "On the Trail of Stevenson" Clayton Hamilton says: Throughout his lifelong wanderings, Stevenson rarely or never attempted to describe a place so long as he was in it. For his selection of descriptive detail he relied always on the subconscious artistry of memory. He trusted his own mind to forget the non-essential; and he seized upon whatever he remembered as, by that token, the most essential features of a scene--the features, therefore, that cried out to be selected as the focal points of the picture to be suggested to the mind's eye of his readers. The author of the thirteen volumes known as "The Chronicles of Barsetshire," a detailed picture of the English clergy of his time, had never associated with bishops, deans, and arch-deacons; he built them up (to use his own expression) out of his "moral consciousness."