scenes, the people, and their manners are purely mental. The hardest travelling—in search of "scenes"—he ever had in his life was in Mexico. He characterises the roads in the wilder parts as indescribable, the food worse, whilst, in the hot country, sleep was most difficult to obtain, owing to the constant torment of venomous insects. A new work will soon appear, centred in these tropical regions.
Before he wrote "Eric Brighteyes" he went to Iceland. He made his way to Bergthorsknoll, the residence of Njal, the hero in "The Story of Burnt Njal"—who was burnt to death in the house there. The irrepressible novelist, with that love of search which he possesses, commenced digging in the floor of the old hall, and there found traces of the burning after eight hundred years. He retains fragments of some of the charred beams in a small Egyptian jar in the study.
He says that he has been often charged with plagiarism, and gave me a most amusing instance of such charges, which are so easy to bring, and so recklessly made.
The study.
From a Photo. by Elliott & Fry.
"I once wrote a skit called 'Mr. Meeson's Will,'" he said. "It was a little hit at the Court of Probate, where I practised. The heroine of the skit is supposed to have a will tattooed upon her shoulders. Now, it appears that there was a French novel—which I had never seen, read, heard, or dreamed of—in which there is a fair damsel who has a will tattooed on another part of her body. I was at once charged with appropriating this idea. Nothing of the kind. The real origin of my tattoo was a trick played upon an eminent Q.C. by his pupils, who sent in a set of papers to him for his consideration, in which the will propounded was supposed to be executed upon the human skin of somebody who was cast away on a desert island. The case interested our friend the Q.C. immensely, and he was so taken in as to give the matter a great deal of time, and actually gave a written opinion as to the validity of the document. This is a fair sample of the accuracy of these charges." Also he has been attacked because some of his tales are full of fights. "But," he says, "did reading of fighting, or even of the oppressions and cruelties of tyrants, ever harm any human creature; and are there, on the other hand, no virtues to be learned from stories of warriors
