Political

If the following pages are ever to see the light of day it will be because they have been stolen from me. The delay that I exact before they shall be disclosed assures me of that.

It was somewhere, I think, towards the autumn of the year 1889 that the thought occurred to me that I might perhaps try to write a little in the modern way. For, hitherto, I had been, as it were, wearing costume in literature.

That brightly plumaged fantasy has an aerial wit and colour all its own. But there are certain works in which a man finds himself at an angle of vision where there is an especially felicitous union of the aesthetic and emotional elements which constitute the basic qualities of his uniqueness. We recognize these works as being welded into a strange unity, as having a homogeneous texture of ecstasy

Some years ago I met my old master, Sir Frank Benson-he was Mr. F. R. Benson then-and he asked me in his friendly way what I had been doing lately. "I am just finishing a book," I replied, "a book that everybody will hate."

The narrative of Vera Zarovitch, published in the Cincinnati Commercial in 1880 and 1881, attracted a great deal of attention. It commanded a wide circle of readers, and there was much more said about it than is usual when works of fiction run through a newspaper in weekly installments.

Nothing evokes more awe, respect, pain, and suffering in real Texans than the memory of the Alamo. It is as though the sacrifice of those brave men and women has been etched into a Texan's heart, mind, and soul. It is written into the mitochondrial akashic memory of Texans. Real Texans approach the Alamo in sacred respect -- reverently, and consume any material or literature that edifies this monument where the brave stood up against religious oppression and political tyranny.

One night a year or so ago I was the guest of a famous literary society. This society, or club, it is well known, believes in celebrating literature-and all sorts of other things-in a thoroughly agreeable and human fashion. It meets not in any gloomy hall or lecture room, it has no gritty apparatus of blackboard, chalk, and bleared water-bottle.