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Rh It was some little time before I realized what the publisher was talking about. Hamilton, without asking permission, had sent my stories to him. Eveleigh Nash was the publisher, and his reader at that time was Maude ffoulkes, who later wrote Lady Cardigan's Memoirs, numerous other biographies, also "My Own Past," and to whom I owe an immense debt for unfailing guidance, help and encouragement from that day to this. I never forget my shrinking fear at the idea of appearing in print, my desire to use another name, my feeling that it was all a mistake somewhere, the idea that I should have a book of my own published being too absurd to accept as true. My relief when, eventually, the papers gave it briefest possible mention, a few words of not unkindly praise or blame, I remember too, and my astonishment, some weeks later, to find a column in the Spectator, followed not long afterwards by an interesting article in the Literary Page of the Morning Post on the genus "ghost story," based on my book--by Hilaire Belloc, as he told me years later. All of which prompted me to try another book ... and after the third, "John Silence," had appeared, to renounce a problematical fortune in dried milk, and with typewriter and kit-bag, to take my precious new liberty out to the Jura Mountains where, at frs. 4.50 a day, I lived in reasonable comfort and wrote more books. I was then thirty-six.

Whether I should be grateful to my fellow-reporter on the Evening Sun is another matter. Liberty is priced above money, at any rate. I have written some twenty books, but the cash received for these, though it has paid for rent, for food, for clothing, separately, has never been enough to pay for all three together, even on the most modest scale of living, and my returns, both from America and England, remain still microscopic. Angus Hamilton I never saw again. A year or so later, while on a lecture tour in New York, things apparently went wrong with him. Life drove against him in some way. He put a sudden end to himself.

It seems strange to me now that so few incidents, Rh