"

"If I had your confidence I'd try it," laughed the Poet, "but alas, in
making me Nature did not design a confidence man."

"Nonsense again," said the Idiot. "Any man who can get the editors to
print Sonnets to Diana's Eyebrow, and little lyrics of Madison Square,
Longacre Square, Battery Place and Boston Common, the way you do, has a
right to consider himself an adept at bunco. I tell you what I'll do
with you. I'll swap off my confidence for your lyrical facility and see
what I can do. Why can't we collaborate and get up a libretto for next
season? They tell me there's large money in it."

"There certainly is if you catch on," said the Poet. "Vastly more than
in any other kind of writing that I know. I don't know but that I would
like to collaborate with you on something of the sort. What is your
idea?"

"Mind's a blank on the subject," sighed the Idiot. "That's the reason I
think I can turn the trick. As I said before, you don't need ideas.
Better off without 'em. Just sit down and write."

"But you must have some kind of a story," persisted the Poet.

"Not to begin with," said the Idiot. "Just write your choruses and
songs, slap in your jokes, fasten 'em together, and the thing is done.
First act, get your hero and heroine into trouble. Second act, get 'em
out."

"And for the third?" queried the Poet.

"Don't have a third," said the Idiot. "A third is always
superfluous--but if you must have it, make up some kind of a vaudeville
show and stick it in between the first and second."

"Tush!" said the Bibliomaniac. "That would make a gay comic opera."

"Of course it would, Mr. Bib," the Idiot agreed. "And that's what we
want. If there's anything in this world that I hate more than another
it is a sombre comic opera. I've been to a lot of 'em, and I give you my
word of honor that next to a funeral a comic opera that lacks gaiety is
one of the most depressing functions known to modern science. Some of
'em are enough to make an undertaker weep with jealous rage. I went to
one of 'em last week called 'The Skylark' with an old chum of mine, who
is a surgeon. You can imagine what sort of a thing it was when I tell
you that after the first act he suggested we leave the theater and come
back here and have some fun cutting my leg off. He vowed that if he ever
went to another opera by the same people he'd take ether beforehand."

"I shouldn't think that would be necessary," sneered the Bibliomaniac.
"If it was as b