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I was mingling in the concerns of life as usual and suddenly became aware of the presence of a red haired wife and two children with large gray eyes; I remember distinctly my utter astonishment and dismay at finding myself so emphatically in for it without any personal consciousness or accountability; what steps I took on the matter I don't know, but I have certainly got rid of the incumbrances this morning much to my relief.
And when he was eighty-five he wrote:
I find that my dreams grow more interesting all the time because they have more material in them from the “hoarded memories of the past,” as Browning says.
In the summer of 1886, he wrote the story, ‘The
Monarch of Dreams.’
It was his first effort in the story-telling line for many years, and he exclaimed:— ‘It is a great and almost unexpected delight to me to find that I can really write an imaginative story.’
This tale did not prove acceptable to magazine editors and was finally published as a booklet at the author's own expense.
‘The
Monarch of Dreams’ was, however, translated into French and was always a favorite of the author's. His relatives fancied that this weird little tale had a morbid tinge, and in answer to their solicitudes, he wrote:—
I am sorry I printed it, if it troubled you, but I never can be sorry that I wrote it, for it is the first
