similar experience. Looking back to the sawdust-box, fancy pictures this
comparable adult a serious and inventive writer engaged in congenial
literary activities in a private retreat. We see this period marked
by the creation of some of the most virile passages of a Work dealing
exclusively in red corpuscles and huge primal impulses. We see
this thoughtful man dragged from his calm seclusion to a horrifying
publicity; forced to adopt the stage and, himself a writer, compelled
to exploit the repulsive sentiments of an author not only personally
distasteful to him but whose whole method and school in belles lettres
he despises.

We see him reduced by desperation and modesty to stealing a pair of
overalls. We conceive him to have ruined, then, his own reputation,
and to have utterly disgraced his family; next, to have engaged in
the duello and to have been spurned by his lady-love, thus lost to him
(according to her own declaration) forever. Finally, we must behold:
imprisonment by the authorities; the third degree and flagellation.

We conceive our man decided that his career had been perhaps too
eventful. Yet Penrod had condensed all of it into eight hours.

It appears that he had at least some shadowy perception of a recent
fulness of life, for, as he leaned against the fence, gazing upon his
wistful Duke, he sighed again and murmured aloud:

"WELL, HASN'T THIS BEEN A DAY!"

But in a little while a star came out, freshly lighted, from the highest
part of the sky, and Penrod, looking up, noticed it casually and
a little drowsily. He yawned. Then he sighed once more, but not