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On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the
rain drumming on the window, I began The Sea Cook, for that was the
original title. I have begun (and finished) a number of other
books, but I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with
more complacency. It is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters
are proverbially sweet. I am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt
the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton
is conveyed from Poe. I think little of these, they are trifles
and details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons or
make a corner in talking birds. The stockade, I am told, is from
Masterman Ready. It may be, I care not a jot. These useful
writers had fulfilled the poet's saying: departing, they had left
behind them Footprints on the sands of time, Footprints which
perhaps another--and I was the other! It is my debt to Washington
Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe
plagiarism was rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the
Tales of a Traveller some years ago with a view to an anthology of
prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones,
his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and
a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters--all were
there, all were the property of Washington Irving. But I had no
guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed
the spring-tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day
by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to the
family. It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me
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