at an evening
party, laughing boisterously, with a plate of chicken-salad in one hand
and a glass of champagne in the other.

One of my first admirers was a gentleman of sixty, who called upon me
with a large roll of manuscript. He had retired from business two years
before, so he informed me, and, having always been a great lover of
poetry, he determined to fill up the tedium of his life of ease by
writing some for himself. Now everybody knows that I am not a poet,--the
few patriotic verses which I wrote during the war having simply been the
result of excitement,--and why should he apply to me? O, there was a
great deal of poetry in my prose, he said. My didactic paper called
"Wait for the Wagon!" showed such a knowledge of metaphor! I looked over
the innumerable leaves, here and there venturing the remark that "rain"
and "shame" were not good rhymes, and that my friend's blank verse had
now and then lines of four and six feet. "Poetic license, sir!" was the
reply. "I thought you were aware that poets are bound to no rules!"

What could I do with such a man? What, indeed, but to return him the
manuscript with that combined gentleness and grace which I have
endeavored to cultivate in my demeanor, and to suggest, in the tenderest
way, that he should be content to write, and not publish? He got up,
stiffened his backbone, placed his conventional hat hard upon his head,
gave a look of mingled mortification and wrath, and hurried away without
saying a word. That man, I assure you, will be my secret enemy to the
day of his death. He is no doubt a literary authority in a small circle
of equal calibre. When my name is mentioned, he will sneer down my
rising fame, and his sneer will control the sale of half a dozen copies
of my last volume.

This is a business view of the subject, I grant; but then _I_ have
always followed literature with an eye to business. The position of a
popular writer is much more independent than that of a teacher or a
clergyman, for which reason I prefer it. The same amount of intellect,
made available in a different way, will produce material results just as
satisfactory. Compensation, however, is the law of the world; hence I
must pay for my independence; and this adventure with the old gentleman
is one of the many forms in which the payment is made.

When the applications for autographs first began to pour in upon me, I
gladly took a sheet of Delarue's creamiest note-paper and wrote thereon
an o