ining, so far as her intelligence was concerned; and the summer rest
had restored her bodily vigor, so that her brain was like an overcharged
battery which will find conductors somewhere to carry off its crowded
energy.

At this time Arrowhead Village was enjoying the most successful season
it had ever known. The Pansophian Society flourished to an extraordinary
degree under the fostering care of the new Secretary. The rector was
a good figure-head as President, but the Secretary was the life of the
Society. Communications came in abundantly: some from the village and
its neighborhood, some from the University and the Institute, some from
distant and unknown sources. The new Secretary was very busy with the
work of examining these papers. After a forenoon so employed, the carpet
of her room looked like a barn floor after a husking-match. A glance at
the manuscripts strewed about, or lying in heaps, would have frightened
any young writer away from the thought of authorship as a business. If
the candidate for that fearful calling had seen the process of selection
and elimination, he would have felt still more desperately. A paper of
twenty pages would come in, with an underscored request to please read
through, carefully. That request alone is commonly sufficient to condemn
any paper, and prevent its having any chance of a hearing; but the
Secretary was not hardened enough yet for that kind of martial law in
dealing with manuscripts. The looker-on might have seen her take up the
paper, cast one flashing glance at its title, read the first sentence
and the last, dip at a venture into two or three pages, and decide as
swiftly as the lightning calculator would add up a column of figures
what was to be its destination. If rejected, it went into the heap
on the left; if approved, it was laid apart, to be submitted to the
Committee for their judgment. The foolish writers who insist on one's
reading through their manuscript poems and stories ought to know how
fatal the request is to their prospects. It provokes the reader, to
begin with. The reading of manuscript is frightful work, at the best;
the reading of worthless manuscript--and most of that which one is
requested to read through is worthless--would add to the terrors of
Tartarus, if any infernal deity were ingenious enough to suggest it as a
punishment.

If a paper was rejected by the Secretary, it did not come before the
Committee, but was returned to the author, if he