al Lays of a Landsman," by Wallace Irwin.
Copyright, 1904, by Dodd, Mead & Co.]

MELINDA'S HUMOROUS STORY

BY MAY McHENRY

Melinda was dejected. She told herself that she was groping in the vale
of despair, that life was a vast, gray, echoing void. She decided that
ambition was dead--a case of starvation; that friendship had slipped
through too eagerly grasping fingers; that love--ah, _love_!--

"You'd better take a dose of blue-mass," her aunt suggested when she had
sighed seven times dolefully at the tea table.

"Not _blue_-mass. Any other kind of mass you please, but _not_ blue,"
Melinda shuddered absently.

No; she was not physically ill; the trouble was deeper--soul sickness,
acute, threatening to become chronic, that defied allopathic doses of
favorite and other philosophers, that would not yield even to hourly
repetition of the formula handed down from her grandmother--"If you can
not have what you want, try to want what you have." Yet she could lay
her finger on no bleeding heart-wound, on no definite cause. It was true
that the deeply analytical, painstakingly interesting historical novel
on which she had worked all winter had been sent back from the
publishers with a briefly polite note of thanks and regrets; but as she
had never expected anything else, that could not depress her. Also, the
slump in G.C. Copper stock had forced her to give up her long-planned
southern trip and even to forego the consolatory purchase of a spring
gown; but she had a mind that could soar above flesh-pot
disappointments. Then, the Reverend John Graham;--but what John Graham
did or said was nothing--absolutely nothing, to her.

So Melinda clenched her hands and moaned in the same key with the east
wind and told the four walls of her room that she could not endure it;
she must _do_ something. Then it was, that in a flash of inspiration, it
came to her--she would write a humorous story.

The artistic fitness of the idea pleased her. She had always understood
that humorists were marked by a deep-dyed melancholy, that the height of
unhappiness was a vantage-ground from which to view the joke of
existence. She would test the dictum; now, if ever, she would write
humorously. The material was at hand, seething and crowding in her mind,
in fact--the monumental dullness and complacent narrowness of the
villagers, the egoism, the conceit, the bland shepherd-of-his-flock
pomposity of John Graham. What more could a humorist de