n your present humor, before the fires die
down."

He laughed.

"Write a book? What in the world should I write about? The world is
deluged and drowned by books. And if I wrote it, who could or would
publish it? Imagine me hawking around a wretched manuscript from
publisher to publisher, until it was tattered, yellow, and
undecipherable. Why, the big London fellows accept only ten MSS. out of
five hundred on the average, and you know I cannot publish at my own
risk."

"Who the mischief spoke about publishing?" I replied, trying to keep up
the flame; "I only asked you to write. Write, write, write, and leave
the publishing to God."

"And what am I to write about? Every subject under the sun is threshed
out and threadbare, from the origin of ideas down to the microbe of
typhoid fever. Not at all; the world is grown too wise for books; we
must devise something else."

"It is not many days ago," I replied, "since I heard you lament the
awful and culpable defects in our popular Catholic literature. Hadn't
you to fall back upon that barbarous book to enlighten Ormsby on the
existence of his immortal soul?"

"Barbarous? I wish to heaven that I could write anything half as good.
But, as you see, there are whole fields of literature yet untrodden by
us, but where heretics and others are reaping rich harvests. Yet, who
would dare make the attempt? Don't you know that the ablest professors
in your own time in Maynooth never ventured into print? They dreaded the
chance shots from behind the hedge from the barrels of those masked
banditti, called 'critics.'"

"Dear me, how you do run on! One would think you had the MS. cut and dry
in your pocket, you talk so glibly about publishers and critics. Can't
you write the book first and then take circumstances as they occur?"

"Well, go on, suggest a subject, sir."

"Now, this is rather sudden, young man. Give me one day, and I'll give
you a list of subjects that would bewilder you! Only promise me you'll
take one up."

"All right!" said he; "I promise. Hallo! where are you taking those
papers?"

"I'm taking them home for the present. They are confiscated to the
Crown."

He looked at them wistfully, as if they were going to the holocaust, as
we might imagine the great mother of the Maccabees watched half with
pain, half with pride, wholly with resignation, her sons mount the
funeral pyre.

[Illustration: "It broke in my fingers and revealed the little dreams
and ambition