Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/156

 on leaving school in the late 'seventies. Hunt retained the double editorship for twenty-two years, giving up Cassell's Family Magazine in 1896 and thereafter concentrating upon the Quiver. The truth was that at this stage the magazine was not going well. It was suffering from the competition of many of the rivals which were so heartily derided by the "old brigade." Sir Wemyss Reid sent for Mr. Max Pemberton, then editor of Chums, and invited him to take charge and carry out a remodelling scheme. The understanding now was that the magazine should be run on broader lines, and "Family" was finally dropped out of the title, which once more became simply Cassell's Magazine.

Max Pemberton, assisted by Holderness Gale, set to work and kept it up for ten pleasant and fruitful years. He had the co-operation of many distinguished authors, and it was his good fortune to introduce two or three to the public. Thus, Robert Chambers, the great American romancer, made one of his earliest English appearances in Cassell's Magazine, while Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, then quite unknown to the public, was encouraged by Mr. Pemberton to come over from California, and soon established herself as one of the leading women authors of the day. It was in Cassell's that Hornung introduced "Raffles" to an admiring public and that Sir Rider Haggard gave us some of the most brilliant of his later stories. Cassell's also had the great privilege of publishing Rudyard Kipling's "Kim." All sorts and conditions of people helped with short stories. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, S. R. Crockett, Tighe Hopkins, Agnes and Egerton Castle, Stanley Weyman, Guy Boothby, William Le Queux, and many others, formed a magazine staff which, in those days, had rarely been equalled.

The editor's work was congenial to Max Pemberton and well suited to one whose chief occupation was fiction. His own visits to the office were infrequent, for Holderness Gale had charge there, and all the reading was done at Mr. Pemberton's own home in Hampstead. "There is