carriage window?
No! Would he not have connected that man with that other certifying
individual who always appends a name and address singularly obscure and
unconvincing, yet who, at some supreme moment, recommends Somebody's
pills to a dying friend,--afflicted with a similar address,--which
restore him to life and undying obscurity. Yet these pictorial and
literary appeals must have a potency independent of the wares they
advertise, or they wouldn't be there.

Perhaps he was the more sensitive to this monotony as he was just then
seeking change and novelty in order to write a new story. He was not
looking for material,--his subjects were usually the same,--he was
merely hoping for that relaxation and diversion which should freshen and
fit him for later concentration. Still, he had often heard of the odd
circumstances to which his craft were sometimes indebted for suggestion.
The invasion of an eccentric-looking individual--probably an innocent
tradesman into a railway carriage had given the hint for "A Night with
a Lunatic;" a nervously excited and belated passenger had once
unconsciously sat for an escaped forger; the picking up of a forgotten
novel in the rack, with passages marked in pencil, had afforded the plot
of a love story; or the germ of a romance had been found in an obscure
news paragraph which, under less listless moments, would have
passed unread. On the other hand, he recalled these inconvenient and
inconsistent moments from which the so-called "inspiration" sprang, the
utter incongruity of time and place in some brilliant conception, and
wondered if sheer vacuity of mind were really so favorable.

Going back to his magazine again, he began to get mildly interested in
a story. Turning the page, however, he was confronted by a pictorial
advertising leaflet inserted between the pages, yet so artistic in
character that it might have been easily mistaken for an illustration of
the story he was reading, and perhaps was not more remote or obscure in
reference than many he had known. But the next moment he recognized
with despair that it was only a smaller copy of one he had seen on the
hoarding at the last station. He threw the leaflet aside, but the flavor
of the story was gone. The peerless detergent of the advertisement had
erased it from the tablets of his memory. He leaned back in his seat
again, and lazily watched the flying suburbs. Here were the usual
promising open spaces and patches of green, quickl