conception: he is a devoted servant of letters, willing to take his
thirty or forty dollars a week, willing to suffer the _peine forte et
dure_ of his profession in the knowledge of honest duty done, writing
terse and marrowy little essays on manuscripts, which are buried in the
publishers' files. This man is an honour to the profession, and I
believe there are many such. Certainly there are many who sigh wistfully
when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their own to devote
an evening to illiterate twaddle. Five book manuscripts a day, thirty a
week, close to fifteen hundred a year--that is a fair showing for the
head reader of a large publishing house.

One can hardly blame him if he sometimes grow skeptic or acid about the
profession of letters. Of each hundred manuscripts turned in there will
rarely be more than three or four that merit any serious consideration;
only about one in a hundred will be acceptable for publication. And the
others--alas that human beings should have invented ink to steal away
their brains! "Only a Lady Barber" is the title of a novel in manuscript
which I read the other day. Written in the most atrocious dialect, it
betrayed an ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable
to a polyp. It described the experiences of a female tonsor somewhere
in Idaho, and closed with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice into
her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, so that she might slice his
ear. No need to harrow you with more of the same kind. I read almost a
score every week. Often I think of a poem which was submitted to me
once, containing this immortal couplet:

She damped a pen in the ooze of her brain and wrote a verse
on the air,
A verse that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen
to set it there.