hsh-meerer."

Sudden and grewsome pause. The splashing ceased. The singer could
hardly have been drowned in a hip bath, but Mr. Garnet hoped for the
best.

His hopes were shattered.

"Come," resumed the young gentleman persuasively, "into the garden,
Maud, for ther black batter nah-eet hath--er--florn."

Jerry Garnet sprang from his seat and paced the room.

"This is getting perfectly impossible," he said to himself. "I must
get out of this. A fellow can't work in London. I'll go down to some
farmhouse in the country. I can't think here. You might just as well
try to work at a musical 'At Home.'"

Here followed certain remarks about the young man upstairs, who was
now, in lighter vein, putting in a spell at a popular melody from the
Gaiety Theater.

He resumed his seat and set himself resolutely to hammer out something
which, though it might not be literature, would at least be capable of
being printed. A search through his commonplace book brought no balm.
A commonplace book is the author's rag bag. In it he places all the
insane ideas that come to him, in the groundless hope that some day he
will be able to convert them with magic touch into marketable plots.

This was the luminous item which first met Mr. Garnet's eye:

_Mem._ Dead body found in railway carriage under seat. Only one living
occupant of carriage. He is suspected of being the murderer, but
proves that he only entered carriage at twelve o'clock in the morning,
while the body has been dead since the previous night.

To this bright scheme were appended the words:

This will want some working up.

J. G.

"It will," thought Jerry Garnet grimly, "but it will have to go on
wanting as far as I'm concerned."

The next entry he found was a perfectly inscrutable lyric outburst.

There are moments of annoyance,
Void of every kind of joyance,
In the complicated course of Man's affairs;
But the very worst of any
He experiences when he
Meets a young, but active, lion on the stairs.

Sentiment unexceptionable. But as to the reason for the existence of
the fragment, his mind was a blank. He shut the book impatiently. It
was plain that no assistance was to be derived from it.

His thoughts wandered back to the idea of leaving London. London might
have suited Dr. Johnson, but he had come to the conclusion that what
he wanted to enable him to give the public of his best (as the
reviewer of the _Academy_, dealing with his