u were more of one. But as Paris
correspondent, we could never engage you, at least not on the terms
you propose. But even if I should succeed in getting a place for you,
do you know English enough to write with ease?"

"I see you are disposed to give vent to your native scepticism toward
me. But I never knew the thing yet that I could not do. At first,
perhaps, I should have to depend somewhat upon your proof-reading, but
before many months, I venture to say, I could stand on my own legs."

After some further parley it was agreed that I should exert myself in
his behalf, and after a visit to the pawnbroker's, where Dannevig had
deposited his dignity, we parted with the promise to meet again at
dinner.

IV.

It was rather an anomalous position for a knight of Dannebrog, a
familiar friend of princes and nobles, and an _ex-habitue_ of the Cafe
Anglais, to be a common reporter on a Chicago republican journal. Yet
this was the position to which (after some daring exploits in
book-reviewing and art criticism) my friend was finally reduced. As an
art-critic, he might have been a success, if western art had been more
nearly in accord with his own fastidious and exquisitely developed
taste. As it was, he managed in less than a fortnight to bring down
the wrath of the whole artistic brotherhood upon our journal, and as
some of these men were personal friends of the principal stockholders
in the paper, his destructive ardor was checked by an imperative order
from the authorities, from whose will there is no appeal. As a
book-reviewer he labored under similar disadvantages; he stoutly
maintained that the reading of a volume would necessarily and unduly
bias the critic's judgment, and that a man endowed with a keen,
literary nose could form an intelligent opinion, after a careful
perusal of the title-page, and a glance at the preface. A man who
wrote a book naturally labored under the delusion that he was wiser or
better than the majority of his fellow-creatures, in which case you
would do moral service by convincing him of his error, inhumanity
continued to encourage authorship at the present rate, obscurity would
soon become a claim to immortality. If a writer informed you that his
work "filled a literary void," his conceit was reprehensible, and on
moral grounds he ought to be chastised; if he told you that he had
only "yielded to the urgent request of his friends," it was only fair
to insinuate that his friends must ha