brities whom he had long
worshipped from afar. The most ordinary mortals all; not one of them had
the mystic touch of Adrian Grant, who seemed to Henry the most
distinguished man among the company.

"Dinner is served, gentlemen," the waiter called, in rousing tones, and
instantly the babble ceased, and members and guests filed out to the
dining-room.

Henry was seated next to his host, and had on his right Mr. Bone, the
eminent publisher, who happened to be the guest of Grinton, the
novelist. The lion lay down with the lamb in the Pen and Pencil Club.

It was the custom of the fraternity after dining to carry on a
discussion on some literary topic, and to "talk shop" to their heart's
content. The chairman, Mr. Diamond Jones, a highly successful literary
critic, whose profound ignorance of literature's deeper depths was the
standing joke of his fellow-clubmen, mentioned that they did talk shop
there, but contended that "literary shop" was worth talking, as
everybody was interested in it; other "shop" was only "shop," and
therefore contemptible. Your literary worker has a fine disdain for
every branch of life but his own.

The speaking was scarcely enthralling. It happened to turn on the
subject of humour in literature, and a celebrated humorist opened the
discussion with some observations which suggested (unfairly) that he
knew very little of what he was talking about. Apparently he had never
heard that Shakespeare was a humorist, or that Carlyle was not devoid of
the quality, or that Thackeray had some of it, not to mention Dickens.
Even Meredith and Hardy escaped the notice of all the speakers, who
talked about most things but the topic that had been introduced. Henry
concluded that the gifts of writing and oratory are seldom wedded in the
one. The best speaker was a novelist, whose books were as free from
humour as Ireland is from snakes. He thought that humour wasn't a high
quality. Good for him that he had none, as the great reading public
likes a man who is either as serious as an owl or as giddy as a Merry
Andrew. Sinclair was reputedly a humorist, but it was difficult to get
him to open his mouth on the subject, and when he did the company was in
doubt whether to laugh or applaud.

"Humour," he said, in his drawling Scotch accent, "is, according to
Russell Lowell, the great antiseptic of leeterature. For my pairt,
'werna ma heart licht I wad dee.'" And he sat down.

Really these great guns of literature th