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[Illustration]

_Business Before Grammar_

We have just been perusing a copy of a certain magazine which
proclaims on its cover that it has doubled its circulation in twenty
months. Within, the editor sets forth what he believes to be the
reasons for this gratifying growth. "The magazine accepts man as he
is--and helps him," says the editor. "The magazine is edited to answer
the questions that keep rising and rising in the average man's head.
It is not edited with the idea of trying to force into the average
man's head a lot of information which he does not hanker for and
cannot make use of."

Having always considered ourself an average man, we turned the pages
hopefully, only to find a considerable amount of information we had
never "hankered" for, and could not make use of, as, for instance, how
to become the biggest "buyer" in the universe, or how a certain
theatrical manager wants you to think he thinks he got on in the world
(there is, to be sure, a quite unintentional psychological interest
here), or how to remember the names of a hundred thousand
people--dreadful thought! So we decided we were not, after all, an
average man, and shifted to the fiction.

There were four short stories and a serial in this issue, and not one
of them concerned itself with people who could speak correct English.
Some of the stories confined their assaults upon our mother tongue to
the dialogue, one was told by a dog (which, of course, excuses much,
in prose as well as verse), and one was entirely written in what we
presume to be a sort of literary Bowery dialect, which we have since
been informed by friends more extensively read than ourself is now the
necessary dialect of American magazine humor, as essential, almost, as
the bathing-girl on the August cover.

"'I think we got about everything. I'll see that the things
is packed in them wardrobe trunks an' sent to your hotel
to-morrow morning. An' believe me, it's been _some_
afternoon, Mr. Bentley!'"

--This, at random, from one of the two stories which dealt with the
"business woman," whose motto seems to be, "Business Before Grammar,"
even as it is the motto of the editor. The other "business woman" was
not quite so lax. She tried as hard to speak correctly as the author
could let her, and won a certain amount of sympathy for her efforts.

But the gem, of course, was the story told all in the li