ccompanying the letter is offered for publication. It is
not commonly brilliant, too often lamentably deficient. If Rachel's
saying is true, that "fortune is the measure of intelligence," then
poverty is evidence of limited capacity, which it too frequently proves
to be, notwithstanding a noble exception here and there. Now an editor
is a person under a contract with the public to furnish them with the
best things he can afford for his money. Charity shown by the
publication of an inferior article would be like the generosity of
Claude Duval and the other gentlemen highwaymen, who pitied the poor so
much they robbed the rich to have the means of relieving them.

Though I am not and never was an editor, I know something of the trials
to which they are submitted. They have nothing to do but to develope
enormous calluses at every point of contact with authorship. Their
business is not a matter of sympathy, but of intellect. They must
reject the unfit productions of those whom they long to befriend,
because it would be a profligate charity to accept them. One cannot
burn his house down to warm the hands even of the fatherless and the
widow.

THE PROFESSOR UNDER CHLOROFORM.

--You haven't heard about my friend the Professor's first experiment in
the use of anaesthetics, have you?

He was mightily pleased with the reception of that poem of his about
the chaise. He spoke to me once or twice about another poem of similar
character he wanted to read me, which I told him I would listen to and
criticize.

One day, after dinner, he came in with his face tied up, looking very
red in the cheeks and heavy about the eyes.--Hy'r'ye?--he said, and
made for an arm-chair, in which he placed first his hat and then his
person, going smack through the crown of the former as neatly as they
do the trick at the circus. The Professor jumped at the explosion as if
he had sat down on one of those small _calthrops_ our grandfathers used
to sow round in the grass when there were Indians about,--iron stars,
each ray a rusty thorn an inch and a half long,--stick through
moccasins into feet,--cripple 'em on the spot, and give 'em lockjaw in
a day or two.

The Professor let off one of those big words which lie at the bottom of
the best man's vocabulary, but perhaps never turn up in his life,--just
as every man's hair _may_ stand on end, but in most men it never does.

After he had got calm, he pulled out a sheet or two of manuscript,
toget