selling for the small sum of fifty cents. If you are suffering--"



I got up and went away without a word. I walked slowly up to the
little park near my hotel, leaving Judson Tate alone with his
conscience. My feelings were lacerated. He had poured gently upon me
a story that I might have used. There was a little of the breath of
life in it, and some of the synthetic atmosphere that passes, when
cunningly tinkered, in the marts. And, at the last it had proven to
be a commercial pill, deftly coated with the sugar of fiction. The
worst of it was that I could not offer it for sale. Advertising
departments and counting-rooms look down upon me. And it would
never do for the literary. Therefore I sat upon a bench with other
disappointed ones until my eyelids drooped.

I went to my room, and, as my custom is, read for an hour stories in
my favourite magazines. This was to get my mind back to art again.

And as I read each story, I threw the magazines sadly and
hopelessly, one by one, upon the floor. Each author, without one
exception to bring balm to my heart, wrote liltingly and sprightly
a story of some particular make of motor-car that seemed to control
the sparking plug of his genius.

And when the last one was hurled from me I took heart.

"If readers can swallow so many proprietary automobiles," I said to
myself, "they ought not to strain at one of Tate's Compound Magic
Chuchula Bronchial Lozenges."