dire things, to tell them the rest of the yarn in advance of publication. After that, of course, publication was unnecessary.

It was a problem with young Edwards, about this time, to secure enough blank paper for his scribbling needs. Two old ledgers, only partly filled with accounts fell into his hands, and he used them for his callow essays at authorship. He has those ledgers now, and derives considerable amusement in looking through them. They prove that he was far from being a prodigy, and reflect credit on him for whipping his slender talents into shape for at least a commercial success in later life. Consider this:

Scene III.

J. B.—We made a pretty good haul that time, Jim.

B. J.—Yes, I'd like to make a haul like that every night. We must have got about $50,000.

J. B.—Now we will go and get our boots blacked, then go and get us a suit of clothes, and then skip to the West Indies.

Here a $50,000 robbery had been committed and the thieves were calmly discussing getting their boots blacked and replenishing their wardrobe (one suit of clothes between them seems to have been enough) before taking to flight. Shades of Sherlock, how easily a boy of 12 makes business for the police department!

Or consider this gem from Act II. The aforesaid "J. B." and "B. J." have evidently been "pinched" while getting their boots blacked or while buying their suit of clothes:

J. B.—We're in the jug at last, Jim, and I'm afraid we'll be sentenced to be shot.

B. J.—Don't be discouraged, Bill.

Enter Sleek, the detective.

Sleek.—We've got you at last, eh?

J. B.—You'll never get the money, just the same.

Sleek.—We'll shoot you if you don't tell where it is like a dog.

Then here's something else which seems to prove that young Edwards occasionally fell into rhyme:

John Milton Edwards has always had a place in his heart for the red man, and another for his country's vanishing timber. He is to be congratulated on his youthful sentiments if not on the way they were expressed.

In 1882 the Edwards family removed to Chicago. There were but three in the family—the father, the mother, and John Milton. The boy was taken from the Ottawa high school and, as soon as they were all comfortably settled in the "Windy City," John Milton made what he has since believed to be the mistake of his career. His father offered him his choice of either a university or a business education. He chose to spend two years in Bryant & Stratton's Business College. His literary career would have been vastly helped had he taken the other road and matriculated at either Harvard or Yale. He had the opportunity and turned his back on it.

He was writing, more or less, all the time he was a student at Bryant & Stratton's. The school grounded him in double-entry bookkeeping, in commercial law, and in shorthand and typewriting.

When he left the business college he found employment with a firm of subscription book publishers, as stenographer. There came a disagreement between the two partners of the firm, and the young stenographer was offered for $1,500 the retiring partner's interest. The elder Edwards, who would have had to furnish the $1,500, could not see anything alluring in the sale of books through agents, and the deal fell through. Two years later, while John Milton was working for a railroad company as ticket agent at $60 a month, his old friend of the subscription book business dropped in on him and showed him a sworn statement prepared for Dun and Bradstreet. He had cleared $60,000 in two years! Had John Milton bought the retiring partner's interest he would have been worth half a million before he had turned thirty.

The fiction bee, however, was continually buzzing in John Milton's brain. He had no desire to succeed at anything except authorship.

Leaving the railroad company, he went to work for a boot and shoe house as bill clerk, at $12 a week. The death of his father, at this time, came as a heavy blow to young Edwards; not only that, but it brought him heavy responsibilities and led him seriously to question the advisibility of ever making authorship—as he had secretly hoped—a vocation. His term as bill clerk was a sort of probation, allowing the young man time, in leisure hours, further to try out his talent for fiction. He was anxious to determine if he could make it a commercial success, and so justify himself in looking forward to it as a life work.

The elder Edwards had been a rugged, self-made man with no patience for anything that was not strictly "business." He measured success by an honorable standard of dollars and cents. For years previous to his death he had been accustomed to see his son industriously scribbling, with not so much as a copper cent realized from all that expenditure of energy. Naturally out of sympathy with what he conceived to be a waste of time and effort, Edwards, Sr., did not hesitate to express himself forcibly. On one occasion he looked into his son's room, saw him feverishly busy at his desk and exclaimed, irascibly, "Damn the verses!"

Young Edwards' mother, on the other hand, was well educated and widely read; indeed, in a limited way, she had been a writer herself, and had contributed in earlier life to Harper's Magazine. She could see that perhaps a pre-natal influence was shaping her son's career, and understood how he might be working out his apprenticeship. Thus she became the gentle apologist, excusing the boy's unrewarded labors, on the one hand, and the father's cui bono ideas, on the other.

The Chicago Times, in its Sunday edition, used a story by young Edwards. It was not paid for but it was published, and the elder Edwards surreptitiously secured many copies of the paper and sent them to distant friends. Thus, although he would not admit it, he showed his pride in his son's small achievement.

From the boot and shoe house young Edwards went back to the railroad company again; from there, when the railroad company closed its Chicago office, he went to a firm of wholesalers in coke and sewer-pipe; and, later, he engaged as paymaster with the firm of contractors. Between the coke and sewer-pipe and the pay-rolls he wedged in a few days of reporting for The Chicago Morning News; and on a certain Friday, the last of February, he got married, and was back at his office desk on the following Monday morning.

The first story for which Edwards received payment was published in The Detroit Free Press, Sept. 19, 1889. The payment was $8.

In April, the same year, the Free Press inaugurated a serial story contest. Edwards entered two stories, one under a nom de plume. Neither won a prize, but both were bought and published. For the first, published in 1891, he was paid $75 on Feb. 2, 1890; and for the second, published a year later, he was paid $100.

With the opening installment of the first serial the Free Press published a photograph of the author over a stickful of biography. On another page appeared a paragraph in boldface type announcing the discovery of a new star in the literary