would print any article or story about the poor of my native land,
so now the publishers, Scotch and English, refused to accept the
book as a gift. I was willing to present it to them, but they
would have it in no guise; there seemed to be a blight on
everything that was Scotch. I daresay we sighed, but never were
collaborators more prepared for rejection, and though my mother
might look wistfully at the scorned manuscript at times and murmur,
'You poor cold little crittur shut away in a drawer, are you dead
or just sleeping?' she had still her editor to say grace over. And
at last publishers, sufficiently daring and far more than
sufficiently generous, were found for us by a dear friend, who made
one woman very 'uplifted.' He also was an editor, and had as large
a part in making me a writer of books as the other in determining
what the books should be about.

Now that I was an author I must get into a club. But you should
have heard my mother on clubs! She knew of none save those to
which you subscribe a pittance weekly in anticipation of rainy
days, and the London clubs were her scorn. Often I heard her on
them - she raised her voice to make me hear, whichever room I might
be in, and it was when she was sarcastic that I skulked the most:
'Thirty pounds is what he will have to pay the first year, and ten
pounds a year after that. You think it's a lot o' siller? Oh no,
you're mista'en - it's nothing ava. For the third part of thirty
pounds you could rent a four-roomed house, but what is a four-
roomed house, what is thirty pounds, compared to the glory of being
a member of a club? Where does the glory come in? Sal, you needna
ask me, I'm just a doited auld stock that never set foot in a club,
so it's little I ken about glory. But I may tell you if you bide
in London and canna become member of a club, the best you can do is