on a very superior friend of mine, a critic, and read it to him. I do
not care for him to see any of my usual work, because he really is a
very superior person indeed, and the perusal of it appears to give him
pains inside. But this article, I thought, would do him good.

"What do you think of it?" I asked, when I had finished.

"Splendid," he replied, "excellently arranged. I never knew you were
so well acquainted with the works of the old writers. Why, there is
scarcely a classic of any note that you have not quoted from. But
where--where," he added, musing, "did you get that last idea but two
from? It's the only one I don't seem to remember. It isn't a bit of
your own, is it?"

He said that, if so, he should advise me to leave it out. Not that it
was altogether bad, but that the interpolation of a modern thought
among so unique a collection of passages from the ancients seemed to
spoil the scheme.

And he enumerated the various dead-and-buried gentlemen from whom he
appeared to think I had collated my article.

"But," I replied, when I had recovered my astonishment sufficiently to
speak, "it isn't a collection at all. It is all original. I wrote
the thoughts down as they came to me. I have never read any of these
people you mention, except Shakespeare."

Of course Shakespeare was bound to be among them. I am getting to
dislike that man so. He is always being held up before us young
authors as a model, and I do hate models. There was a model boy at