I did; and it was not altogether imitated from Ik Marvel either, for I drew upon the easier art of Dickens at times, and helped myself out with bald parodies of Bleak House in many places.  It was all very well at the beginning, but I had not reckoned with the future sufficiently to have started with any clear ending in my mind, and as I went on I began to find myself more and more in doubt about it.  My material gave out; incidents failed me; the characters wavered and threatened to perish on my hands.  To crown my misery there grew up an impatience with the story among its readers, and this found its way to me one day when I overheard an old farmer who came in for his paper say that he did not think that story amounted to much.  I did not think so either, but it was deadly to have it put into words, and how I escaped the mortal effect of the stroke I do not know.  Somehow I managed to bring the wretched thing to a close, and to live it slowly into the past.  Slowly it seemed then, but I dare say it was fast enough; and there is always this consolation to be whispered in the ear of wounded vanity, that the world’s memory is equally bad for failure and success; that if it will not keep your triumphs in mind as you think it ought, neither will it long dwell upon your defeats.  But that experience was really terrible.  It was like some dreadful dream one has of finding one’s self in battle without the courage needed to carry one creditably through the action, or on the stage unprepared by study of the part which one is to appear in.  I have hover looked at that story since, so great was the shame and anguish that I suffered from it, and yet I do not think it was badly conceived, or attempted upon lines that were mistaken.  If it were not for what happened in the past I might like some time to write a story on the same lines in the future.

XV.  DICKENS

What I have said of Dickens reminds me that I had been reading him at the same time that I had been reading Ik Marvel; but a curious thing about the reading of my later boyhood is that the dates do not sharply detach themselves one from another.  This may be so because my reading was much more multifarious than it had been earlier, or because I was reading always two or three authors at a time.  I think Macaulay a little antedated Dickens in my affections, but when I came to the novels of that masterful artist (as I must call him, with a thousand reservations as to the times when he is not a master and not an artist), I did not fail to fall under his spell.

This was in a season of great depression, when I began to feel in broken health the effect of trying to burn my candle at both ends.  It seemed for a while very simple and easy to come home in the middle of the afternoon, when my task at the printing-office was done, and sit down to my books in my little study, which I did not finally leave until the family were in bed; but it was not well, and it was not enough