logical conditions
of his own than in many of the verses. Together with a mounting aversion
to the work, he noted a growing strength for it. He could dispatch a
dozen poems in almost as many minutes, and not slight them, either; but
he no longer jumped to his work. He was aware of trying to cheat himself
in it, of pretending that the brief space between titles in the table of
contents, which naturally implied a poem, sometimes really indicated a
short bit of prose. He would run his eye hastily over an index, and seek
to miss rather than find the word "poem" repeated after a title, and
when this ruse succeeded he would go back to the poem he had skipped
with the utmost unwillingness. If his behavior was sinful, he was duly
punished for it, in the case of a magazine which he took up well toward
midnight, rejoicing to come upon no visible sign of poetry in it. But
his glance fell to a grouping of titles in a small-print paragraph at
the bottom of the page, and he perceived, on close inspection, that
these were all poems, and that there were eighteen of them.

He calculated, roughly, that he had read from eighty-five to a hundred
poems before he finished; after a while he ceased to take accurate count
as he went on, but a subsequent review of the magazines showed that his
guess was reasonably correct. From this review it appeared that the
greater number of the magazines published two poems in each month, while
several published but one, and several five or seven or four. Another
remarkable fact was that the one or two in the more self-denying were as
bad as the whole five or seven or nine or eighteen of those which had
more freely indulged themselves in verse. Yet another singular feature
of the inquiry was that one woman had a poem in five or six of the
magazines, and, stranger yet, always a good poem, so that no editor
would have been justified in refusing it. There was a pretty frequent
recurrence of names in the title-pages, and mostly these names were a
warrant of quality, but not always of the author's best quality. The
authorship was rather equally divided between the sexes, and the poets
were both young and old, or as old as poets ever can be.

When the explorer had returned from the search, which covered apparently
a great stretch of time, but really of space, he took his notes and went
with them to that elder friend of his whose generous enthusiasm had
prompted his inquiry. Together they looked them over and discu