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“Humph,” I observed, “unless we said `sixteen years passed’ at the end of the first chapter, and then we might get him in in the second.”

“It strikes me,” said Harry dubiously, “he ought to be in it all through. What do you say to making him another stolen baby belonging to another organ? Just as likely to have two stolen as one.”

It did occur to me that if it came to that, all the characters in the story might begin life in this romantic way. However, there seemed no objection to starting the hero in an organ-grinder’s cradle, and we closed with the suggestion at once and got into bed.

I woke very early. I had the hero on my mind. I wanted him to be a good one after the best model, and I could not help thinking that the Harry in him ought not to be overdone. Besides, if he was to make himself pleasant to the heroine, the less he was like Harry and the more he was like Harry’s chief friend the better. For sisters in fiction never make much of their brothers, but they often make a lot of their brothers’ friends.

I nudged Harry with my elbow, in order to represent the case to him from this point of view. I did it delicately and in a most conciliatory manner.

“I was thinking, old man, as Alice is the heroine and you’re her brother, I might–don’t you know–perhaps you’d like if–well, what I mean to say is, perhaps I’d better do the gush, when it comes to that.”

Happily Harry was scarcely awake, and did not take in all my meaning.

“All serene,” said he, “we’ll have as little of that as we can.”

“I mean I think you’d do the parts about the villain and that sort of thing better–don’t you?”

But as Harry was asleep again I had to take silence for consent.

The day that followed was an anxious one. It is easy enough to get your characters, but it is awful having to fix their names. And it is simple work getting a plot, compared with the agony of dividing it up into forty chapters!

This was the task before us to-day, and we retired as before to the pier-head with pencils and paper, in order to do it beyond the sound of Aunt Sarah’s voice.

We endured agonies over the names. The hero’s name should naturally have been a judicious combination of the names of the two fellows we had in our minds’ eyes. But neither “Sydrey Sproutock” nor “Hardney Hulltels” exactly pleased us. Finally we decided to call him Henry Sydney, and, strange to say, it occurred to me it would be best as a rule to speak of him by his surname, while Harry was equally strong about calling him by his Christian name. At last we agreed that when we, the authors, spoke of him it should be as Sydney, and that when the heroine or any one else mentioned his name it should be as Henry–Harry explaining that “as they’re to be kids together there won’t be anything strange in her calling him by his Christian name.” The heroine, after much searching of heart, we christened Alicia Dearlove, and the villain Sarah Vixen.

The other names we made up from a local directory which we were lucky enough to stumble across in the pavilion.

Then came the formidable work of slicing up our novel into forty pieces. We wrote the figures down the side of a long sheet of paper, and looked with something like dismay at the work we had set before us.

“Seems a lot of chapters,” said Harry; “couldn’t we make it thirty?”

“Wouldn’t run to six shillings if we did,” said I.

That settled it, and we set ourselves to fill up the blanks.

“Chapter the First,” wrote I. “Theft of Alicia–Sorrow of her Parents– The Organ-grinder’s Lodgings–Suspicions of the Police–The Hero in the Room underneath.”