chewing the end of one's pencil and waiting for inspiration. Down it went: "There are four seasons in the year—spring, summer, autumn or fall, and winter." We never omitted to say "autumn or fall;" the synonymy helped out the page, and gave us the more time in which to consider what we should say next. That is the great difficulty in authorship. On that shoal many a good ship has struck. A man who always has something to say next is bound to get on—as a "space writer," if as nothing else.
Our opening remark was not strictly original, but we did not mind. It was true, if it wasn't new; and without being told, I think we had discovered—by intuition, I suppose—what older heads seem to have learned by rule, that it is good rhetoric, so to speak, to begin with a quotation. I was pleased, the other day, to see a brilliant essayist commending it as an excellent and becoming practice to leapfrog into one's subject over the back of some famous predecessor. Such was our custom, for better or worse, till a certain master (I am tempted to name him, but forbear) announced just before the
