y books are
published and flourish a little while in their bright wrappers, but yours
and theirs and mine waste away in a single precious copy.

I am convinced that a close inspection of all desks--a federal matter as
though Capital were under fire--would betray thousands of abandoned novels.
There may be a few stern desks that are so cluttered with price-sheets and
stock-lists that they cannot offer harborage to a love tale. Standing desks
in particular, such as bookkeepers affect, are not always chinked
with these softer plots. And rarely there is a desk so smothered in
learning--reeking so of scholarship--as not to admit a lighter nook for
the tucking of a sea yarn. Even so, it was whispered to me lately that
Professor B----, whose word shakes the continent, holds in a lower drawer
no fewer than three unpublished historical novels, each set up with a full
quota of smugglers and red bandits. One of these stories deals scandalously
with the abduction of an heiress, but this must be held in confidence. The
professor is a stoic before his class, but there's blood in the fellow.

There is, therefore, little use in your own denial. You will recall that
once, when taken to a ruined castle, you brooded on the dungeons until a
plot popped into your head. You crammed it with quaint phrasing from the
chroniclers. You stuffed it with soldiers' oaths. "What ho! landlord,"
you wrote gayly at midnight, "a foaming cup, good sir. God pity the poor
sailors that take the sea this night!" And on you pelted with your plot to
such conflicts and hair-breadth escapes as lay in your contrivance.

These things you have committed. Good sir, we are of a common piece. Let us
salute as brothers! And therefore, as to a comrade, I bid you continue in
your ways. And that you may not lack matter for your pen, I warmly urge
you, when by shrewdest computation you have exhausted the plots of
adventure and have worn your villains thin, that you proceed in quieter
vein. I urge you to an April mood, for the winds of Spring are up and
daffodils nod across the garden. There is black earth in the Spring and
green hilltops, and there is also the breath of flowers along the fences
and the sound of water for your pen to prattle of.

A Plague of All Cowards

Having written lately against the dog, several acquaintances have asked me
to turn upon the cat, and they have been good enough to furnish me with
instances of her faithlessness. Also, a lady with