They managed, however, to induce the proprietors of a young
lady who was reputed to be the vulgarest and most fascinating of all
music-hall artistes, to introduce Mr. Courtland's name into one of
the movable stanzas of her most popular lyric: those stanzas which are
changed from week to week, so as to touch upon the topics which are
uppermost in the minds--well, not exactly the minds--of the public. It
is scarcely necessary to say that this form of advertisement is worth
columns of the daily papers; and if Mr. Courtland had only shown himself
appreciative of his best interests and had changed the title of his
book to "The Land of the New Guinea Pig," instead of "The Quest of
the Meteor-Bird," they would have gone to press with an extra thousand
copies.

But even as it was they knew that between the member of Parliament and
the music-hall young lady the sale of the book was a certainty.
Their calculations were not at fault. The publishers sent a liberal
subscription to the Nonconformist Eastern Mission, whose agents had
stimulated public curiosity in Mr. Courtland's new book by suggesting
that he had carried out, single-handed, one of the most atrocious
massacres of recent years; and a diamond brooch to the music-hall young
lady who had so kindly worked in the reference to the book after dancing
one of her most daring hornpipes in the uniform of a midshipman; they
doubled the lines of their announcements in the advertising columns
of the paper that had issued the cartoon of the New Guinea Pig,
and, finally, they sent a presentation copy of "The Quest of the
Meteor-Bird," to Mr. Ayrton.

Then, as everyone was humming the lines of the music-hall young lady:

"From the land of far New Guinea
Came a little pig-a-ninny,"

the daily papers were bound to give two-column reviews to the book on
the day of its publication; and as the rod which Moses cast down before
Pharaoh swallowed up the wriggling rods of the magicians, the interest
attaching to Mr. Courtland's book absorbed that which attached to all
the other books of the season, including "Revised Versions," though the
publishers of the latter moved heaven and earth (that is to say, the
bishop and the people's churchwarden) to get the Rev. George Holland
prosecuted. If either had been susceptible to reason, and had got up a
case against their author, the publishers declared that Mr. Courtland's
book would not have had a chance with "Revised Versions." To be sure