In 1869, when I was about twenty-three years old, I sent a couple of sonnets to the revived _Putnam's Magazine_. At that period I had no intention of becoming a professional writer: I was studying civil engineering at the Polytechnic School in Dresden, Saxony. Years before, I had received parental warnings--unnecessary, as I thought--against writing for a living. During the next two years, however, when I was acting as hydrographic engineer in the New York Dock Department, I amused myself by writing a short story, called "Love and Counter-Love," which was published in _Harper's Weekly_, and for which I was paid fifty dollars. "If fifty dollars can be so easily earned," I thought, "why not go…
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