ld take you to be
'Blackwood' slashing an American book, rather than a Yankee editor looking
over a friend's virgin novel. You are like all critics, Barry. They ignore
what might please them greatly if they had not their critical behavior on,
and grow savage over that part of an author which they should speedily
forget--like a dog on a country highway, that turns up his cold nose at the
delicate hedge-blossoms, and growls over a decayed bone! So you find
nothing to admire in my sixteen chapters?"

"Not much."

"Then say a good word for that little."

"There are some lines, Ralph, some whole paragraphs, may be, that would be
very fine in a poem; but in an every-day novel they are strikingly out of
place. Your jewels, (heart-jewels I suppose you call 'em,) seem to me like
diamonds on the bosom of a calicoed and untidy chambermaid. That
sentimental chapter with 'The Dead Hope' caption, is quite as good as your
blank verse, and I would wager a copy of Griswold's 'Poets of America,'
against a doubtful three-cent piece, that you wrote it in rhyme--it's not
very difficult, you know, to turn your poetry into prose. You needn't
stare. In a word, your book is as tame as a sick kitten--I hate kittens:
there's something diabolical in a yellow cat!"

I nipped a smile in the bud, and said, quietly:

"I intended to write a tame, simple domestic story. The facts are garnered
from my own experience, and--"

"Garnered from your maternal grandparent, Ralph! Very much I believe it.
Very much anybody will. It's a wonder to me that you didn't call the book
'Heart-life by an Anatomy'!"

"I will acknowledge, Barescythe, that I have not done my best in this
affair. 'Yet consider,' as Fabricio says in the play, ''twas done at a
sitting: a single sitting, by all the saints! I will do better when I have
those pistoles, and may use time.' Local tales of this school have been
popular. I wrote mine to sell."

"But it won't."

"Why?"

"Let's see. How many 'sunsets' have you in the book?"

"Not many, I think."

"That was an oversight. There should be one at the end of each
chapter--twenty 'sunsets' at least. Then you have no seduction."

"A seduction?" horrified.

"Of course. What modern novel is complete without one? It gives a spicy
flavor to the story. People of propriety like it. Prim ladies of an
uncertain age always 'dote' on the gallant, gay Lothario, and wish that he
wasn't so _very_ wicked!"

And Barry raised his eye-brows,