hat," said the Idiot. "And yet the great fortunes
have been made in a way which involved very little labor, comparatively
speaking. You, for instance, probably work harder over a yard of poetry
that brings you in ten dollars than any of our great railroad magnates
have over a mile of railroad which has brought them in a million."

"Which simply proves that it is ideas that count rather than labor,"
said the Poet.

"Not exactly," said the Idiot. "If you put a hundred ideas into a
quatrain you will get less money for it than you would for a two-volume
epic in which you have possibly only half an idea. It isn't idea so much
as nerve that counts. The man who builds railroads doesn't advance any
particular idea, but he shows lots of nerve, and it is nerve that makes
wealth. I believe that if you literary men would show more nerve force
and spare the public the infliction of what you call your ideas, you
would make more money."

"How would you show nerve in writing?" queried the Bibliomaniac.

"If I knew I'd write and make my fortune," said the Idiot.
"Unfortunately, I don't know how one can show nerve in writing, unless
it be in taking hold of some particularly popular idiosyncrasy of
mankind and treating it so contemptuously that every one would want to
mob you. If you could get the public mad enough at you to want to mob
you they'd read everything you'd write, simply to nourish their wrath,
and you'd soon be cutting coupons for a living, and could then afford to
take up more ideas--coupon-cutters can afford theories. For my own part,
one reason why I do not myself take up literature for a profession is
that I have neither the nerve nor the coupons. I'd probably run along in
the rut like a majority of the writers of to-day, and wouldn't have the
grit to strike out in a new line of my own. Men say, and perhaps very
properly, this is the thing that has succeeded in the past. I'll do
this. Something else that appears alluring enough in the abstract has
never been done, and for that reason I won't do it. There have been
clever men before me, men clever enough to think of this something that
I fondly imagine is original, and they haven't done it. Doubtless they
refrained from doing it for good and sufficient reasons, and I am not
going to be fool enough to set my judgment up against theirs. In other
words, I lack the nerve to go ahead and write as I feel. I prefer to
study past successes, with the result that I am moderately