mon people heard Him, gladly.' (The Scribes did not.)

"After all, there is nothing especially debasing in a taste for yarns
which drip with mystery and suspense and ceaseless action; even if the
style and concept of these yarns be grossly lacking in certain approved
elements. So the tale be written with strong evidence of sincerity and
with a dash of enthusiasm, why grudge it a small place of its own in
readers' hours of mental laziness?

"With this shambling apology,--which, really, is no apology at all,--I lay
my book on your knees. You may like it or you may not. You will find it
alive with flaws. But, it is alive.

"I don't think it will bore you. Perhaps there are worse
recommendations."

=iv=

Hulbert Footner does not look like a writer of mystery stories. A tall,
handsome, well-dressed, extremely courteous gentleman who, had he the
requisite accent, might just have arrived from Bond Street. He has a trim
moustache. Awfully attractive blue eyes! He lives on a farm at Sollers,
Maryland. No one else, it seems, is so familiar with the unusual corners
of New York City, the sort of places that get themselves called "quaint."
No one else manages the affairs of young lovers (on paper) with quite so
much of the airy spirit of young love. I can think of no one else who
could write such a scene as that in _The Owl Taxi_, where the dead-wagon,
on its way in the night to the vast cemetery in a New York suburb, is held
up for the removal of a much-needed corpse. Such material is bizarre. The
handling of it must be very deft or the result will be revolting; and yet
the thing can be done. In the latter part of that excellent play, _Seven
Keys to Baldpate_, George M. Cohan and his company bandied a corpse from
attic to cellar of a country house. This preposterous scene as presented
on the stage was helplessly laughable. Mr. Footner's scene in _The Owl
Taxi_ is like that.

The man has a special gift for the picturesque person. I do not know
whether he uses originals; if I suspect an original for old Simon Deaves
in _The Deaves Affair_, I get no farther than a faint suspicion that ...
No, I cannot identify his character. (Not that I want to; I am not a
victim of that fatal obsession which fastens itself upon so many readers
of fiction--the desire to identify the characters in a story with someone
in real life. The idea is ridiculous.) Mr. Footner knows Greenwich
Village. He knows outlying stretches in the greater city of New