errand, the major reached for the manuscript; and looking very solemn,
he said,

"Mr. Stack, I don't think I can accept this story. In some respects it
is really wonderful; but I am afraid that if I published it, it would
attract almost too much attention. People would get too wild over it.
We have to be careful. For instance, here in the first chapter you
mention the death of Mrs. McGinnis, the hero's mother. She dies; you
inter Mrs. McGinnis in the cemetery; you give an affecting scene at
the funeral; you run up a monument over her and plant honeysuckle upon
her grave. You create in the reader's mind a strong impression
that Mrs. McGinnis is thoroughly dead. And yet, over here in the
twenty-second chapter, you make a man named Thompson fall in love with
her, and she is married to him, and she goes skipping around through
the rest of the story as lively as a grasshopper, and you all the time
alluding to Thompson as her second husband. You see that kind of thing
won't do. It excites remark. Readers complain about it."

"You don't say I did that? Well, now, do you know I was thinking
all the time that it was _Mr._ McGinnis that I buried in the first
chapter? I must have got them mixed up somehow."

"And then," continued the major, "when you introduce the hero, you
mention that he has but one arm, having lost the other in battle. But
in chapter twelve you run him through a saw-mill by an accident, and
you mention that he lost an arm there, too. And yet in the nineteenth
chapter you say, 'Adolph rushed up to Mary, threw his arms about her,
and clasped her to his bosom;' and then you go on to relate how he sat
down at the piano in the soft moonlight and played one of Beethoven's
sonatas 'with sweet poetic fervor.' Now, the thing, you see, don't