and pronounce on their merits; these manuscripts
having almost invariably been rejected by the editors to whom they have
been sent, and having as a rule no literary value whatever.

"'He is expected to sign petitions, to contribute to journals, to write
for fairs, to attend celebrations, to make after-dinner speeches, to
send money for objects he does not believe in to places he never heard
of.

"'He is called on to keep up correspondences with unknown admirers, who
begin by saying they have no claim upon his time, and then appropriate
it by writing page after page, if of the male sex; and sheet after
sheet, if of the other.

"'If a poet, it is taken for granted that he can sit down at any moment
and spin off any number of verses on any subject which may be suggested
to him; such as congratulations to the writer's great-grandmother on her
reaching her hundredth year, an elegy on an infant aged six weeks, an
ode for the Fourth of July in a Western township not to be found in
Lippincott's last edition, perhaps a valentine for some bucolic lover
who believes that wooing in rhyme is the way to win the object of his
affections.'

"Is n't it so? I asked the Celebrity.

"'I would bet on the prose lover. She will show the verses to him, and
they will both have a good laugh over them.'

"I have only reported a small part of the conversation I had with
the Literary Celebrity. He was so much taken up with his pleasing
self-contemplation, while I made him air his opinions and feelings and
spread his characteristics as his laundress spreads and airs his linen
on the clothes-line, that I don't believe it ever occurred to him
that he had been in the hands of an interviewer until he found himself
exposed to the wind and sunshine in full dimensions in the columns of
The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor.'"

After the reading of this paper, much curiosity was shown as to who the
person spoken of as the "Literary Celebrity" might be. Among the various
suppositions the startling idea was suggested that he was neither more
nor less than the unexplained personage known in the village as Maurice
Kirkwood. Why should that be his real name? Why should not he be the
Celebrity, who had taken this name and fled to this retreat to escape
from the persecutions of kind friends, who were pricking him and
stabbing him nigh to death with their daggers of sugar candy?

The Secretary of the Pansophian Society determined to question the