That autumn the Chancelleries of Europe happened to be rather less egotistic than usual, and the English and American publics, seeing no war-cloud on the horizon, were enabled to give the whole of their attention to the balloon sent up into the sky by Mr. Onions Winter. They stared to some purpose. There are some books which succeed before they are published, and the commercial travellers of Mr. Onions Winter reported unhesitatingly that A Question of Cubits was such a book. The libraries and the booksellers were alike graciously interested in the rumour¹ of its advent². It was universally considered a 'safe' novel; it was the sort of novel that the honest provincial³ bookseller reads himself for his own pleasure and recommends to his customers with a peculiar⁴ and special smile of sincerity⁵ as being not only 'good,' but 'really good.' People mentioned it with casual anticipatory⁶ remarks who had never previously⁷ been known to mention any novel later than John Halifax Gentleman.  
This and other similar pleasing phenomena⁸ were, of course, due in part to the mercantile sagacity of Mr. Onions Winter. For during a considerable period the Anglo-Saxon race was not permitted to forget for a single day that at a given moment the balloon would burst and rain down copies of A Question of Cubits upon a thirsty earth. A Question of Cubits became the universal question, the question of questions, transcending⁹ in its insistence¹⁰ the liver question, the soap question, the Encyclopædia question, the whisky question, the cigarette question, the patent food question, the bicycle tyre question, and even the formidable uric acid question. Another powerful factor in the case was undoubtedly¹¹ the lengthy¹² paragraph concerning Henry's adventure at the Alhambra. That paragraph, having crystallized itself into a fixed¹³ form under the title 'A Novelist in a Box,' had started on a journey round the press of the entire world, and was making a pace which would have left Jules Verne's hero out of sight in twenty-four hours. No editor could deny his hospitality to it. From the New York dailies it travelled viâ the Chicago Inter-Ocean to the Montreal Star, and thence back again with the rapidity of light by way of the Boston Transcript¹⁴, the Philadelphia Ledger¹⁵, and the Washington Post, down to the New Orleans Picayune. Another day, and it was in the San Francisco Call, and soon afterwards it had reached La Prensa at Buenos Ayres. It then disappeared for a period amid the Pacific Isles¹⁶, and was next heard of in the Sydney Bulletin, the Brisbane Courier and the Melbourne Argus. A moment, and it blazed in the North China Herald¹⁷, and was shooting across India through the columns of the Calcutta Englishman and the Allahabad Pioneer. It arrived in Paris as fresh as a new pin, and gained acceptance by the Paris edition of the New York Herald, which had printed it two months before and forgotten it, as a brand-new item of the most luscious¹⁸ personal gossip. Thence, later, it had a smooth passage to London, and was seen everywhere with a new frontispiece consisting of the words: 'Our readers may remember.' Mr. Onions Winter reckoned that it had been worth at least five hundred pounds to him.
 
But there was something that counted more than the paragraph, and more than Mr. Onions Winter's mercantile sagacity, in the immense preliminary noise and r............