He would see men and cities, writing as he went. Looking back,
years later, he was able to congratulate himself on having chosen
the right road. He thought it would lead him by easy ascent to fame
and fortune. It did better for him than that. It led him through
poverty and loneliness, through hope deferred and heartache--through
long nights of fear, when pride and confidence fell upon him,
leaving him only the courage to endure.
His great poems, his brilliant essays, had been rejected so often
that even he himself had lost all love for them. At the suggestion
of an editor more kindly than the general run, and urged by need, he
had written some short pieces of a less ambitious nature. It was in
bitter disappointment he commenced them, regarding them as mere
pot-boilers. He would not give them his name. He signed them
"Aston Rowant." It was the name of the village in Oxfordshire where
he had been born. It occurred to him by chance. It would serve the
purpose as well as another. As the work progressed it grew upon
him. He made his stories out of incidents and people he had seen;
everyday comedies and tragedies that he had lived among, of things
that he had felt; and when after their appearance in the magazine a
publisher was found willing to make them into a book, hope revived
in him.
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