kind of thing. It makes them delirious and
murderous."

"Too bad!" said Stack. "I forgot what I'd said about her eyes when I
wrote that scene with the villain."

"And here, in the twentieth chapter, you say that Magruder was stabbed
with a bowie-knife in the hands of the Spaniard, and in the next
chapter you give an account of the _post-mortem_ examination, and make
the doctors hunt for the bullet and find it embedded in his liver.
Even patient readers can't remain calm under such circumstances. They
lose control of themselves."

"It's unfortunate," said Stack.

"Now, the way you manage the Browns in the story is also exasperating.
First you represent Mrs. Brown as taking her twins around to church to
be christened. In the middle of the book you make Mrs. Brown lament
that she never had any children, and you wind up the story by bringing
in Mrs. Brown with her grandson in her arms just after having caused
Mr. Brown to state to the clergyman that the only child he ever had
died in his fourth year. Just think of the effect of such a thing on
the public mind! Why, this story would fill all the insane asylums in
the country."

"Those Browns don't seem to be very definite, somehow," said Stack,
thoughtfully.

"Worst of all," said major, "in chapter thirty-one you make the lovers
resolve upon suicide, and you put them in a boat and drift them over
Niagara Falls. Twelve chapters farther on you suddenly introduce them
walking in the twilight in a leafy lane, and although afterward she
goes into a nunnery and takes the black veil because he has been
killed by pirates in the Spanish West Indies, in the next chapter to
the last you have a scene where she goes to a surprise-party at the
Presbyterian minister's and finds him there making arrangements for
the wedding as if nothing had ever happened; and then, after you
disclose the fact that she was a boy in disguise, and not a woman at
all, you marry them to each other, and represent the boy heroine as
giving her blessing to her daughter. Oh, it's awful--awful! It won't
do. It really won't. You'd better go into some other kind of business,
Mr. Stack."

Then Stack took his manuscript and went home to fix it up so as to
make the story run together better. The _Patriot_ will not publish it
even if Stack reconstructs it.

* * * * *

Major Slott, like most other editors, is continually persecuted by
bores, but recently he was the victim of a pe