ans of them he redeemed all his pledges, paid most of
his bills, and bought a new set of tires for his wheel. The storiettes
at least kept the pot a-boiling and gave him time for ambitious work;
while the one thing that upheld him was the forty dollars he had received
from The White Mouse. He anchored his faith to that, and was confident
that the really first-class magazines would pay an unknown writer at
least an equal rate, if not a better one. But the thing was, how to get
into the first-class magazines. His best stories, essays, and poems went
begging among them, and yet, each month, he read reams of dull, prosy,
inartistic stuff between all their various covers. If only one editor,
he sometimes thought, would descend from his high seat of pride to write
me one cheering line! No matter if my work is unusual, no matter if it
is unfit, for prudential reasons, for their pages, surely there must be
some sparks in it, somewhere, a few, to warm them to some sort of
appreciation. And thereupon he would get out one or another of his
manuscripts, such as "Adventure," and read it over and over in a vain
attempt to vindicate the editorial silence.

As the sweet California spring came on, his period of plenty came to an
end. For several weeks he had been worried by a strange silence on the
part of the newspaper storiette syndicate. Then, one day, came back to
him through the mail ten of his immaculate machine-made storiettes. They
were accompanied by a brief letter to the effect that the syndicate was
overstocked, and that some months would elapse before it would be in the
market again for manuscripts. Martin had even been extravagant on the
strength of those ten storiettes. Toward the last the syndicate had
been paying him five dollars each for them and accepting every one he
sent. So he had looked upon the ten as good as sold, and he had lived
accordingly, on a basis of fifty dollars in the bank. So it was that he
entered abruptly upon a lean period, wherein he continued selling his
earlier efforts to publications that would not pay and submitting his
later work to magazines that would not buy. Also, he resumed his trips
to the pawn-broker down in Oakland. A few jokes and snatches of humorous
verse, sold to the New York weeklies, made existence barely possible for
him. It was at this time that he wrote letters of inquiry to the several
great monthly and quarterly reviews, and learned in reply that they
rarely