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 mechanically grinding out a grist that meant nothing to him as an honest, artistic output, or as the intellectual food of millions, or even as the equivalent of comforts and social joys to himself.

It has been said often enough that there are moments in life when the shock of some trifling incident seems suddenly to precipitate and crystallize a man's character—to combine the elements of his past and set the form of his future out of a clear solution of his hidden qualities of temperament and absorbed incidents of experience and wholly invisible fermentations of thought. Certainly there was such an incident in Carey's life on a rainy October night in 1899—and I believe that Carey may be better explained by a laboratory study of him in the chemical processes of that crystallizing event than by any character analysis and empirical formula of him as he was afterward.

In October, 1899, then.

And even so short a time ago as that is Owen Carey was unknown; he was poor and he was thin—although these are now unbelievable facts, all of them. He was trying to break into the monthly magazines with short stories; and the short story was a form for which he never had any aptitude. Meantime, he was writing specials for the Saturday