to fight duels
with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian
archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.

"But the great scene is when his rival for the princess' hand, Count
Feodor, attacks him between the portcullis and the ruined chapel,
armed with a mitrailleuse, a yataghan, and a couple of Siberian
bloodhounds. This scene is what runs the best-seller into the
twenty-ninth edition before the publisher has had time to draw a
check for the advance royalties.

"The American hero shucks his coat and throws it over the heads of the
bloodhounds, gives the mitrailleuse a slap with his mitt, says 'Yah!'
to the yataghan, and lands in Kid McCoy's best style on the count's
left eye. Of course, we have a neat little prize-fight right then
and there. The count--in order to make the go possible--seems to be
an expert at the art of self-defence, himself; and here we have the
Corbett-Sullivan fight done over into literature. The book ends with
the broker and the princess doing a John Cecil Clay cover under the
linden-trees on the Gorgonzola Walk. That winds up the love-story
plenty good enough. But I notice that the book dodges the final
issue. Even a best-seller has sense enough to shy at either leaving a
Chicago grain broker on the throne of Lobsterpotsdam or bringing over
a real princess to eat fish and potato salad in an Italian chalet on
Michigan Avenue. What do you think about 'em?"

"Why," said I, "I hardly know, John. There's a saying: 'Love levels
all ranks,' you know."

"Yes," said Pescud, "but these kind of love-stories are rank--on the
level. I know something about literature, even if I am in plate-glass.
These kind of books are wrong, and yet I never go into a train but
what they pile 'em up on me. No good can come out of an international
clinch between the Old-World aristocracy and one of us fresh
Americans. When people in real life marry, they generally hunt up
somebody in their own station. A fellow usually picks out a girl that
went to the same high-school and belonged to the same singing-society
that he did. When young millionaires fall in love, they always select
the chorus-girl that likes the same kind of sauce on the lobster that
he does. Washington newspaper correspondents always many widow ladies
ten years older than themselves who keep boarding-houses. No, sir,
you can't make a novel sound right to me when it makes one of C. D.
Gibson's bright young men go abroad and turn kin