importance. It would interest nobody to know that I always write the
last paragraph first, and then work directly up to that, avoiding all
digressions and side issues. Then who on earth would care to be told
about the trouble my characters cause me by talking too much? They will
talk, and I have to let them; but when the story is finished, I go over
the dialogue and strike out four fifths of the long speeches. I fancy
that makes my characters pretty mad.

THIS is the golden age of the inventor. He is no longer looked upon as
a madman or a wizard, incontinently to be made away with. Two or three
centuries ago Marconi would not have escaped a ropeless end with his
wireless telegraphy. Even so late as 1800, the friends of one Robert
Fulton seriously entertained the luminous idea of hustling the poor man
into an asylum for the unsound before he had a chance to fire up the
boiler of his tiny steamboat on the Hudson river. In olden times
the pillory and the whipping-post were among the gentler forms of
encouragement awaiting the inventor. If a man devised an especially
practical apple-peeler he was in imminent danger of being peeled with it
by an incensed populace. To-day we hail with enthusiasm a scientific or
a mechanical discovery, and stand ready to make a stock company of it.

A MAN is known by the company his mind keeps. To live continually
with noble books, with "high-erected thoughts seated in the heart of
courtesy," teaches the soul good manners.

THE unconventional has ever a morbid attraction for a certain class of
mind. There is always a small coterie of highly intellectual men and
women eager to give welcome to whatever is eccentric, obscure, or
chaotic. Worshipers at the shrine of the Unpopular, they tingle with a
sense of tolerant superiority when they say: "Of course this is not the