FROM THE LIFE
mechanically grinding out a grist that meant nothing to him as an honest, artistic output, or as the intellectual food of millions, or even as the equivalent of comforts and social joys to himself.
2
It has been said often enough that there are moments in life when the shock of some trifling incident seems suddenly to precipitate and crystallize a man's character—to combine the elements of his past and set the form of his future out of a clear solution of his hidden qualities of temperament and absorbed incidents of experience and wholly invisible fermentations of thought. Certainly there was such an incident in Carey's life on a rainy October night in 1899—and I believe that Carey may be better explained by a laboratory study of him in the chemical processes of that crystallizing event than by any character analysis and empirical formula of him as he was afterward.
In October, 1899, then.
3
And even so short a time ago as that is Owen Carey was unknown; he was poor and he was thin—although these are now unbelievable facts, all of them. He was trying to break into the monthly magazines with short stories; and the short story was a form for which he never had any aptitude. Meantime, he was writing specials for the Saturday
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