The general impression perhaps conveyed by the above remarks will be that to those who go to work in the manner described—­for many writers of course have quite other processes—­story-telling must be a mechanical trade.  Yet nothing can be farther from the fact.  These preliminary arrangements have the effect of so steeping the mind in the subject in hand, that when the author begins his work he is already in a world apart from his everyday one; the characters of his story people it; and the events that occur to them are as material, so far as the writer is concerned, as though they happened under his roof.  Indeed, it is a question for the metaphysician whether the professional story-teller has not a shorter lease of life than his fellow-creatures, since, in addition to his hours of sleep (of which he ought by rights to have much more than the usual proportion), he passes a large part of his sentient being outside the pale of ordinary existence.  The reference to sleep ’by rights’ may possibly suggest to the profane that the storyteller has a claim to it on the ground of having induced slumber in his fellow-creatures; but my meaning is that the mental wear and tear caused by work of this kind is infinitely greater than that produced by mere application even to abstruse studies (as any doctor will witness), and requires a proportionate degree of recuperation.

I do not pretend to quote the experience (any more than the mode of composition) of other writers—­though with that of most of my brethren and superiors in the craft I am well acquainted—­but I am convinced that to work the brain at night in the way of imagination is little short of an act of suicide.  Dr. Treichler’s recent warnings upon this subject are startling enough, even as addressed to students, but in their application to poets and novelists they have far greater significance.  It may be said that journalists (whose writings, it is whispered, have a close connection with fiction) always write in the ‘small hours,’ but their mode of life is more or less shaped to meet their exceptional requirements; whereas we storytellers live like other people (only more purely), and if we consume the midnight oil, use perforce another system of illumination also—­we burn the candle at both ends.  A great novelist who adopted this baneful practice and indirectly lost his life by it (through insomnia) notes what is very curious, that notwithstanding his mind was so occupied, when awake, with the creatures of his imagination, he never dreamt of them; which I think is also the general experience.  But he does not tell us for how many hours before he went to sleep, and tossed upon his restless pillow till far into the morning, he was unable to get rid of those whom his enchanter’s wand had summoned.[8] What is even more curious than the story-teller’s never dreaming of the shadowy beings who engross so much of his thoughts, is that (so far as my own experience goes at least) when a