ake
an acknowledgment, and you express your insincere thanks to the obliging
secretary of a literary organization which does not exist anywhere on
earth.

A scheme of lighter creative touch is that of the correspondent who
advises you that he is replenishing his library and desires a detailed
list of your works, with the respective dates of their first issue,
price, style of binding, etc. A bibliophile, you say to yourself. These
interrogations should of course have been addressed to your publisher;
but they are addressed to you, with the stereotyped "thanks in advance."
The natural inference is that the correspondent, who writes in a brisk
commercial vein, wishes to fill out his collection of your books, or,
possibly, to treat himself to a complete set in full crushed Levant.
Eight or ten months later this individual, having forgotten (or hoping
you will not remember) that he has already demanded a chronological list
of your writings, forwards another application couched in the self-same
words. The length of time it takes him to "replenish" his library (with
your books) strikes you as pathetic. You cannot control your emotions
sufficiently to pen a reply. From a purely literary point of view this
gentleman cares nothing whatever for your holograph; from a mercantile
point of view he cares greatly and likes to obtain duplicate specimens,
which he disposes of to dealers in such frail merchandise.

The pseudo-journalist who is engaged in preparing a critical and
biographical sketch of you, and wants to incorporate, if possible, some
slight hitherto unnoted event in your life--a signed photograph and
a copy of your bookplate are here in order--is also a character which
periodically appears upon the scene. In this little Comedy of Deceptions
there are as many players as men have fancies.

A brother slave-of-the-lamp permits me to transfer this leaf from the
book of his experience: "Not long ago the postman brought me a letter of
a rather touching kind. The unknown writer, lately a widow, and plainly
a woman of refinement, had just suffered a new affliction in the loss
of her little girl. My correspondent asked me to copy for her ten or a
dozen lines from a poem which I had written years before on the death of
a child. The request was so shrinkingly put, with such an appealing
air of doubt as to its being heeded, that I immediately transcribed the
entire poem, a matter of a hundred lines or so, and sent it to her. I am
un