“This also, I perceive, answers another question: what is my method of accumulating material? I find I have none. The material seems to present itself or to be gathered up and packed away without conscious effort in some store-house of memory. I can almost always go to this garret, turn over the junk, and haul out what I want. It generally needs some making over, piecing and patching, to be sure, but there is always something there that will serve. I have never had to make a memorandum, as I understand many authors do, of likely phrases, telling words, and so on, never sketched out a scene or plot, never got up in the middle of the night, or hopped off an omnibus to rush after a scrap of paper and pencil in order to ‘jot down’ some immortal thought. The only thing I do sometimes ‘jot down’ is the chronology of the narrative; John McGinnis and Mary Dill are married at such-and-such a date; then, will their son, Dill McGinnis, be fifteen at such-and-such a date? I never know, and have to count up on my fingers, and generally revise the schedule afterwards; and I have been caught up pretty sharply by the unprofessional critics who volunteer criticism in letters to authors, for being as much as twenty years out in my figures, or for making contradictory statements. The sole excuse I have to offer is that I can’t count, and never got any farther than six times eight, which I believe makes forty-eight, in the multiplication-table. Invincible ignorance, in other words, must be my salvation!