ng. A subject I'm rather interested in,--new Welsh
dictionary. Don't suppose it's in your line, eh, eh?"--and the tall,
spare man laughed a boyish laugh like a mischievous bird, and tossed his
head at the jest.

His face was small and sallow and tired; but the dark eyes were full of
fun and kindness. Presently, he rose and began to walk up and down the
room with a curious, prancing walk, rolling himself a cigarette, and
talking away in a rapid, jerky fashion with his continual, "eh, eh?"
coming in all the time.

"Poor Gerard! So you know him? How is he now?" and he lowered his voice
with the suggestion of a mutual confidence, and stopped in his walk till
Henry should answer. "Poor Gerard! And he might have been--well,
well,--never mind. We were together at King's. Brilliant fellow. So you
know Gerard. Dear me! Dear me!"

Then he turned to the subject of Henry's visit.

"Well, my poor boy, nothing will satisfy you but literature? You are
determined to be a literary man, eh, eh?" Then he stopped in front of
Henry and laid his hand kindly on his shoulder, "Is it too late to say,
'Go back while there is yet time'? Perhaps--of course--you're going to
be a very great man," and he broke off into his walk again, with one of
his mischievous laughs. "But unless you are, take my word, it's a poor
game--Yet, I suppose, it's no use talking. I know, wasted breath, wasted
breath--Well, now, what can you do? and, by the way, you won't grow fat
on _The Fleet Street Review_. Ten shillings a column is our magnificent
rate of payment, and we can hardly afford that--"

Then he began pulling out one book and another from the piles of all
sorts that lay around him. "I suppose, like the rest, you'd better begin
on poetry. There's a tableful over there--go and take your pick of it,
unless, of course, you've got some special subject. You're not, I
suppose, an authority on Assyriology, eh, eh?"

Henry feared not, and then a new fit of industry came upon the editor,
and he begged Henry to take a look at the books while he ran through
another proof for the post.

That dusty table--evidently the rubbish-heap of the room--was Henry's
first object-lesson in the half tragical, half farcical, over-production
of modern literature. Such a mass of foolishness and ineptitude he had
never conceived of; such pretentiousness too--and while he made various
melancholy reflections upon human vanity, what should he unearth
suddenly from the heap, but his o