"Don't you imperil your decent young soul with it," I advised earnestly.
"It reeks of poisonous piety. The world he paints is so full of
nauseating virtues that any self-respecting man would rather live in
hell. His characters all talk like a Sunday-school picnic out of the
Rollo books. No such people ever lived or ever could live, because a
righteously enraged populace would have killed 'em in early childhood.
He's the smuggest fraud and best seller in the United States.
Wheelwright? The crudest, shrewdest, most preposterous panderer to
weak-minded--"

"Whew! Help! I didn't know what I was starting," protested my visitor.
"As a literary critic you're some Big Bertha, Dominie. I begin to
suspect that you don't care an awful lot about Mr. Wheelwright's style
of composition. Just the same, I've got to read him. All of him. Do you
think I'll find his stuff in the Penny Circulator?"

"My poor, lost boy! Probably not. It is doubtless all out in the hands
of eager readers."

However, Phil contrived to round it up somewhere. The awful and
unsuspected results I beheld on my first visit of patronage to Barbran's
cellar, the occasion being the formal opening. A large and curious crowd
of five persons, including myself and Phil Stacey, were there. Outside,
an old English design of a signboard with a wheel on it creaked
despairingly in the wind. Below was a legend: "_At the Sign of the
Wheel_--_The Wrightery_." The interior of the cellar was decorated with
scenes from the novels of Harvey Wheelwright, triumphant virtue,
discomfited villains, benignant blessings, chaste embraces, edifying
death-beds, and orange-blossoms. They were unsigned; but well I knew
whose was the shame. Over the fireplace hung a framed letter from the