That luxurious study, with its shelves of handsomely-bound books, its beautiful pictures, its warm, fragrant air--great heavens! what might not a man do who sat at his ease amid such surroundings! He began to work at the Reading-room, but at the same time he thought often of the novelist's suggestion, and before long had written two or three short stories.

No editor would accept them; but he continued to practise himself in that art, and by degrees came to fancy that, after all, perhaps he had some talent for fiction.

It was significant, however, that no native impulse had directed him to novel-writing.

His intellectual temper was that of the student, the scholar, but strongly blended with a love of independence which had always made him think with distaste of a teacher's life.

The stories he wrote were scraps of immature psychology--the last thing a magazine would accept from an unknown man.
His money dwindled, and there came a winter during which he suffered much from cold and hunger.