ssor Litton was a
babe in arms compared with many of his pupils, who read little--or with
the janitor, who read nothing at all.

And now, arrived at a scant forty and looking a neglected fifty,
short-sighted, stoop-shouldered and absent-minded to a proverb, he cast
a last fond look at the parcel containing his translation of the Bacchic
epic and climbed the stairs to his bachelor bedroom, took off his shabby
garments, and stretched himself out in the illiterate sleep of a tired
farm-hand.

Just one dream he had--a nightmare in which he read a printed copy of
his work, and a wrongly accented enclitic stuck out from one of the
pages like a sore thumb. He woke in a cold sweat, ran to his duplicate
proofs, found that his text was correct--and went back to bed contented.

Of such things his terrors and his joys had consisted all his years.

III

The next morning he felt like a laborer whose factory has closed. Every
day would be Sunday hereafter until he got another job. In this unwonted
sloth he dawdled over his porridge, his weak tea, and his morning paper.

Head-lines caught his eyes shouting the familiar name of Joel
Brown--familiar to the world at large because of the man's tremendous
success and relentless severity in business. Brown fell in love with one
of those shy, sly young women who make a business of millionaires. He
fell out with a thud and his Flossie entered a suit for breach of
promise, submitting selected letters of Brown's as proofs of his guile
and of her weak, womanly trust.

The newspapers pounced on them with joy, as cats pounce and purr on
catnip. The whole country studied Brown's letters with the rapture of
eavesdropping. Such letters! Such oozing molasses of sentiment! Such
elephantine coquetry! Joel weighed two hundred and eighteen pounds and
called himself Little Brownie and Pet Chickie!

This was the literature that the bewildered Litton found in the first
paper he had read carefully since he came up for air. One of the letters
ran something like this:

Angel of the skies! My own Flossie-dovelet! Your Little Brownie has
not seenest thee for a whole half a day, and he is pining,
starving, famishing, perishing for a word from your blushing
liplets. Oh, my Peaches and Cream! Oh, my Sugar Plum! How can your
Pet Chickie live the eternity until he claspeths thee again this
evening? When can your Brownie-wownie call you all his ownest only
one? Ten billion