was not worth the candle. I was called to the bar, and practised for about a year. I had read a good deal of talk in the papers of boys' books, and I determined to write one. I did it in my spare evenings, chiefly for amusement. The title of it was 'King Solomon's Mines.' It was a big success, and remains so, though I never had a very high opinion of it myself."
I have just had put into my hand the bone with which the old Don in the famous romance used to write. There is ink on it still. Here, too, is the veritable chart itself—the original map of those wonderful mines. Shall I help to destroy its delightful romance if I tell how this curious piece of linen of three hundred years ago really came into existence? A sister-in-law of Mr. Haggard's ingeniously executed the whole thing, and those fearfully and wonderfully made characters were penned by her own hand with coloured pigments! Mr. Haggard tells a merry story of a little adventure he had one day with this map.
He was taking it to be bound with the MSS., and travelling on the Underground Railway. The frontispiece of "King Solomon's Mines" is an exact reproduction of the original map. An old lady got into the same compartment as the novelist, and opening a copy of this very work, at once became deeply interested in the frontispiece. She turned it this way and that way—all ways, but was more puzzled than ever. It was impossible for Mr. Haggard to resist the temptation. He took the real thing out of his pocket, put it on his knee, and began studying it too. It caught the innocent old lady's eye. She looked from book to author, from copy to original, and was perfectly bewildered. Mr. Haggard got out at the next station, and when the train left the platform there was the old lady staring at him out of the window with indescribable amazement still written on her face.
Mr. Haggard's house, in which the Boer Convention was signed.
In connection with "King Solomon's Mines" he once received a letter from a girls' school in America, thanking him most gratefully for writing a book "without a woman in it"! He also received a round robin from the members of some great firm of electricians in Austria, acquainting him with the pleasure that some work of his had given them. It bore seven signatures, each writer of which was of a different nationality.
Then the manuscript volume of "She" is taken down from one of the shelves. It was written in six weeks, and a fortnight out of that time was occupied largely in doing a friend's work—reporting cases in the Divorce Court for The Times. To write a novel in little more than four weeks is a truly remarkable undertaking, the brilliant result making it a still greater accomplishment. Mr. Haggard sat down to write it with a very slight idea of the plot, only with the great creative character in his mind that of—an immortal woman—a type. A story which a lady once wrote and told him—the story of a woman and a cave—helped him in writing "She." The original sherd of "She" is over the mantelpiece.
Soon afterwards he left the bar, finding that his reputation as an author was detrimental to his practice there. The success of "King Solomon's Mines" and "She," the rush now for his earlier works—comparatively little read—was sufficient inducement for him to go on. As one work succeeded the other, his reputation was strengthened, his genius as a writer of romance impressed every book lover, his descriptive powers were considered as marvellously real as they were in many cases brilliantly imaginative. He is a great traveller. He spends months in a country where the scene of his work is to be laid. His notes of the
