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552 trip to Niagara," he said to a friend. "Do you think people would read it? I think we like to read about what we have seen, and I can only describe that. I have no inventive genius." This was before the completion of his first story, "A Foregone Conclusion." There is much in Howells's style to lead to the inference that if he had confined himself to historical writing he might have attained more enduring fame. It is not the writer's purpose to criticise the novelist's art. We are content to quote the clever woman who said she hoped Mr. Howells would redeem himself, and, following the example of him who Artemus Ward said "was a good poet, but he didn't know how to spell," write a "Legende of Goode Womeyne" of the nineteenth century.