"I did not have, when I went to New York, a business acquaintance in the great city, and for days and weeks and, literally, months, no client opened my door. On the one hand, I had fastened upon me a clog, a hindrance, the paralysis of poverty (for my father had met with recent reverses) without having had the benefit in boyhood of that poverty which sharpens the wits and arouses the money-making faculties and teaches inexperienced youth how to push its own way into an adverse world. On the other hand I had grown up in a circle of the highest intelligence and culture inspired on both sides by the noblest and warmest sense of faith and duty. But those were influences which did not help me to be world-wise, and which many a time deterred me from taking a step across the line of self-respect into the field of immediate success. I did not have the gift of what is called 'popular oratory.' My public speaking was in the courts and in the public schools and in the hand-to-hand fights of political conventions and committees. Literature brought me some practice but no help; for magazines and newspapers at that time were not rich and paid nothing to beginners. I have had editorials in the great New York papers on subjects in which I was interested, and articles in magazines, but all the money which I received from literature during my life in New York was twenty-three dollars for twenty-three pages in the 'New York Quarterly Review' for an article (a reply to an attack by the 'North British' on Bryant, Longfellow and other American poets) which was more noticed and quoted by the press than any other article in that number of the 'Review.' Luck, too, was against me! No sooner had I made my mark in the 'New York Quarterly' than it went into bankruptcy; no sooner had I acquired a foothold in the 'International Magazine' by the first number of a novel called 'Mr. Ashburner in New York,' than the Harpers bought the magazine, and, extinguishing it, brought my novel from its beginning to its end.
"In the days of my New York life I thought that I advanced slowly—much too slowly. But now in the retrospect I am amazed that I advanced so fast. I was a young lawyer, poorly equipped for the law and a stranger in a great city; yet, in those ten years I held the office of notary, of loan commissioner, of trustee of public schools. I was nominated for the state legislature (defeated); for the senate (declined) and for judge of the court of common pleas (defeated). I was elected and reelected trustee of public schools, and appointed
