Excerpt from A Study in Scarlet, And, the Sign of the Four Two years later, in 1882, after a four months' voyage to the west coast of Africa, he settled down as a medical practitioner at Southsea, in England, Where he remained until 1890. Those were arduous and trying years, in which he Came to regard the calls of the profession he had adopted as interruptions in the real work of his life, and found that the writing of stories was a very Slender prop upon Which to lean for a livelihood. Fifty little cylin ders of manuscript, he says, did I send out during eight years, which described a regular orbit among publishers, and usually came back, like paper boomerangs, to the place that they had started from. All this time he was writing anonymously, and during the ten years of his liter ary apprenticeship, he states that, in spite of unceasing and untiring literary efiort, he never in any one year earned fifty pounds by his pen. Another grievous dis appointment which added to his harassing experience at this period was the disappearance of a long story entitled The Narrative of yohn Smith, upon which he had spent a great deal of pains and time. It was lost in the mails and never heard of again.