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Rh started and edited the student's magazine which, as the Phœnix, still survives. His next published writings were in the educational papers, his first book was a little text-book of biology in two volumes for the use of his cramming-class students. Then he began to write humourous articles and sketches and short stories in the Pall Mall Gazette, the Saturday Review and other publications. Among the students of his cramming classes in London, he met his present wife, Catherine Robbins. To her sympathy, loyalty, cooperation, and capable management of his affairs his success in the world is very largely due. For from three and twenty onward, his life has been one of steadily increasing prosperity with more freedom, more leisure, more travel, and a wider and more various circle of friends every year.

These facts will suffice to give the reader an idea of the angle from which the writings here collected were done. Those ruling questions, "What is the drive in me?" "What has it got to do with the other drives?" "What has it got to do with the spectacle without?" seem to have been almost innate. Before he left the draper's shop the writer, inspired perhaps by Lucretius, Humboldt, and the Gregorian telescope, was jotting down in a little note-book his rudimentary answers to such questions as "What is matter?" and "What is space?" and while he was still a student at the Royal College he schemed a universal history. These were not so much ambitions as attempts to satisfy an overpowering need to know—to know personally, to get hold of the hang of life as one saw it, with that clearness, that sense xv