Two or three years ago I was dependent on literature for my daily bread.  I was a regular man-of-all-work.  Having the advantage of knowing a clerk in the Foreign Office who went into society (he had been my pupil at the university), I picked up a good deal of scandalous gossip, which I published in the Pimlico Postboy, a journal of fashion.  I was also engaged as sporting prophet to the Tipster, and was not less successful than my contemporaries as a vaticinator of future events.  At the same time I was contributing a novel (anonymously) to the Fleet Street Magazine, a very respectable publication, though perhaps a little dull.  The editor had expressly requested me to make things rather more lively, and I therefore gave my imagination free play in the construction of my plot.  I introduced a beautiful girl, daughter of a preacher in the Shaker community.  Her hand was sought in marriage by a sporting baronet, who had seen her as he pursued the chase through the pathless glens of the New Forest.  This baronet she married after suffering things intolerable from the opposition of the Shakers.  Here I had a good deal of padding about Shakers and their ways; and, near the end of the sixth chapter my heroine became the wife of Sir William Buckley.  But the baronet proved a perfect William Rufus for variegated and versatile blackguardism.  Lady Buckley’s life was made impossible by his abominable conduct.  At this juncture my heroine chanced to be obliged to lunch at a railway refreshment-room.  My last chapter had described the poor lady lunching lonely in the bleak and gritty waiting room of Swilby Junction, lonely except for the company of her little boy.  I showed how she fell into a strange and morbid vein of reflection suggested by the qualities of the local sherry.  If she was to live, her lord and master, Sir W. Buckley, must die!  And I described how a fiendish temptation was whispered to her by the glass of local sherry.  “William’s constitution, strong as it is,” she murmured inwardly, “could never stand a dozen of that sherry.  Suppose he chanced to partake of it—­accidentally—­rather late in the evening.”  Amidst these reflections I allowed the December instalment of “The Baronet’s Wife” to come to a conclusion in the Fleet Street Magazine.  Obviously crime was in the wind.

It is my habit to read the “Agony Column” (as it is flippantly called), the second column in the outer sheet of the Times.  Who knows but he may there see something to his advantage; and, besides, the mysterious advertisements may suggest ideas for plots.  One day I took up the “Agony Column,” as usual, at my club, and, to my surprise, read the following advertisement:—­

“F.  S. M.—­SHERRY WINE.  WRECK OF THE “JINGO.”—­WRETCHED BOY:  Stay your unhallowed hand!  Would you expose an erring MOTHER’S secret?  Author will please communicate with Messrs. Mantlepiece and Co., Solicitors, Upton-on-the-Wold.”