reading. I was given next to a young man, not, so I understood, a
regular reader, but a member of the advertising department who was
frequently called on to help weed out manuscript, who took me home with
him and threw me onto a couch littered with books and papers. Here I
stayed for ever so long. One day I heard the young man say to his
wife, nodding toward me: "I ought to try to get that unfortunate thing
off my hands before my vacation, but I never seem to get around to it."
As, alack-a-day! he did not get around to me before that occasion, I
went, packed in the bottom of a trunk, with the young man and his wife
on their annual holiday. In my pitchy gaol I had, of course, no means
of calculating the flight of time, but when I next saw the light, after
what seemed to me an interminable spell, I appeared to be the occasion
of some excitement. The young man brought me up after several vigorous
dives into the bottom of the trunk, as his wife was saying with much
energy: "Well, of course, you can do as you please, but if I were you
I'd telegraph an answer right straight back that I did not propose to
spend my vacation working for them. The idea! After all you do!"
"Oh, well," was the young man's reply, "some poor dog of an author
wrote the thing, and it's only right that he should have some kind of
an answer within a reasonable time. I ought to have got around to it
long ago."

Whatever the kind-hearted young man may have said about me I was given
yet another chance. A very business-like chap "took a shot at me," as
he expressed it, one forenoon at his desk, I was considerably
distressed, however, by the confusion and the multiplicity of
interruptions to which his attention to me was subject. When I thought
of the sacred privacy devoted to my creation, the whole-hearted
consecration of my dear parent's life-blood to my being, I felt that
such a reading was little short of criminally unjust. And how could