第34章 THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY(5)

It was astonishing to see what one little creature like The Terror could accomplish in the course of a single season.She found out what each member could do and wanted to do.She wrote to the outside visitors whom she suspected of capacity,and urged them to speak at the meetings,or send written papers to be read.As an official,with the printed title at the head of her notes,PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY,she was a privileged personage.She begged the young persons who had travelled to tell something of their experiences.She had contemplated getting up a discussion on the woman's rights question,but being a wary little body,and knowing that the debate would become a dispute and divide the members into two hostile camps,she deferred this project indefinitely.It would be time enough after she had her team well in hand,she said to herself,--had felt their mouths and tried their paces.This expression,as she used it in her thoughts,seems rather foreign to her habits,but there was room in her large brain for a wide range of illustrations and an ample vocabulary.She could not do much with her own muscles,but she had known the passionate delight of being whirled furiously over the road behind four scampering horses,in a rocking stage-coach,and thought of herself in the Secretary's chair as not unlike the driver on his box.A few weeks of rest had allowed her nervous energy to store itself up,and the same powers which had distanced competition in the classes of her school had of necessity to expend themselves in vigorous action in her new office.

Her appeals had their effect.A number of papers were very soon sent in;some with names,some anonymously.She looked these papers over,and marked those which she thought would be worth reading and listening to at the meetings.One of them has just been presented to the reader.As to the authorship of the following one there were many conjectures.A well-known writer,who had spent some weeks at Arrowhead Village,was generally suspected of being its author.

Some,however,questioned whether it was not the work of a new hand,who wrote,not from experience,but from his or her ideas of the condition to which a story-teller,a novelist,must in all probability be sooner or later reduced.The reader must judge for himself whether this first paper is the work of an old hand or a novice.

SOME EXPERIENCES OF A NOVELIST.

"I have written a frightful number of stories,forty or more,Ithink.Let me see.For twelve years two novels a year regularly:

that makes twenty-four.In three different years I have written three stories annually:that makes thirty-three.In five years one a year,--thirty-eight.That is all,is n't it?Yes.Thirty-eight,not forty.I wish I could make them all into one composite story,as Mr.Galton does his faces.

"Hero--heroine--mamma--papa--uncle--sister,and so on.Love--obstacles--misery--tears--despair--glimmer of hope--unexpected solution of difficulties--happy finale.

"Landscape for background according to season.Plants of each month got up from botanical calendars.

"I should like much to see the composite novel.Why not apply Mr.

Galton's process,and get thirty-eight stories all in one?All the Yankees would resolve into one Yankee,all the P----West Britons into one Patrick,etc.,what a saving of time it would be!

"I got along pretty well with my first few stories.I had some characters around me which,a little disguised,answered well enough.

There was the minister of the parish,and there was an old schoolmaster either of them served very satisfactorily for grandfathers and old uncles.All I had to do was to shift some of their leading peculiarities,keeping the rest.The old minister wore knee-breeches.I clapped them on to the schoolmaster.The schoolmaster carried a tall gold-headed cane.I put this in the minister's hands.So with other things,--I shifted them round,and got a set of characters who,taken together,reproduced the chief persons of the village where I lived,but did not copy any individual exactly.Thus it went on for a while;but by and by my stock company began to be rather too familiarly known,in spite of their change of costume,and at last some altogether too sagacious person published what he called a 'key'to several of my earlier stories,in which Ifound the names of a number of neighbors attached to aliases of my own invention.All the 'types,'as he called them,represented by these personages of my story had come to be recognized,each as standing for one and the same individual of my acquaintance.It had been of no use to change the costume.Even changing the sex did no good.I had a famous old gossip in one of my tales,--a much-babbling Widow Sertingly.'Sho!'they all said,that 's old Deacon Spinner,the same he told about in that other story of his,--only the deacon's got on a petticoat and a mob-cap,--but it's the same old sixpence.'