at decked her
alabaster brow and hid them in the Stygian umbrage of her hair. From the
fleecy, graceful cloud she snared the marvellous drapery that floated
like a dream about her queenly figure, and from the Peri at Heaven's
gate she captured the matchless grace that bore her like an enchanted
wraith through the hymeneal scene.

"The array of presents spread in the throne-room of the Skinner palace
has been unexcelled in lavish expenditure of fabulous and reckless
prodigal wealth anywhere in the world. Golden tokens literally strewed
the apartment, merely as effulgent settings for the mammoth, appalling,
maddening array of jewels and precious stones, sunbursts and pearls
without price, that gleamed like a transcendent electrical display in
the hypnotising picture."

There was more of the same kind, but it need not be set down here.
However, it should be said that nothing we ever printed in the paper
before or since set the town to laughing as did that piece. We have
calls to-day for papers containing the circus-poster wedding, and it was
printed over two decades ago.

It was Mehronay's first great triumph in town; then the expected
happened. For three days he did not appear at the office and we
suspected the truth--that by day he slept the sleep of the unjust in the
loft of Huddleson's stable and by night he vibrated between the Elite
oyster parlour, where he absorbed fabulous quantities of soup, and Red
Martin's gambling-room, where he disported himself most festively before
the gang assembled there. The morning of the fourth day Mehronay
appeared--but not at his desk. We found him sitting glumly on his stool
at the case in the back room, clicking the types, with his hat over his
eyes and the smile rubbed off his face.

We were a month coaxing Mehronay back in to the front room. His
self-respect grew slowly, but finally it returned, and he sat at his
desk turning off reams of copy so good that the people read the paper up
one side and down the other hunting for his items. He is the only man we
have ever had around the paper who could write. Everyone else we have
employed has been a news-gatherer. But Mehronay cared little for what we
call news. He went about the town asking for news, and getting more or
less of it, but the way he put it was much more important than the thing
itself. He had imagination. He created his own world in the town, and
put it in the paper so vividly that before we realised it the whole tow