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Other documents randomly have
different content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Philistine:
a periodical of protest (Vol. III, No. 2, July
1896)
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: The Philistine: a periodical of protest (Vol. III, No. 2, July

1896)

Author: Various

Editor: Elbert Hubbard

Release date: January 7, 2024 [eBook #72653]

Language: English

Original publication: East Aurora: The Society of the Philistines,

1895

Credits: hekula03 and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced
from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital
Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PHILISTINE:

A PERIODICAL OF PROTEST (VOL. III, NO. 2, JULY 1896) ***
 The Philistine
A Periodical of Protest.
I am sure care’s an enemy to life.—Twelfth Night.

Printed Every Little While for The Society

of The Philistines and Published by Them
Monthly. Subscription, One Dollar Yearly

Single Copies, 10 Cents. July, 1896.

 THE PHILISTINE.

CONTENTS FOR JULY.

A Sea Song, F. W. Pickard.

A Bit of War Photography, T. W. Higginson.
A Prologue, Stephen Crane.
A Hot Weather Idyll, Estes Baker.
A Venture in Manuscript, Charles M. Skinner.
The Micketts of a Wybirt, Ian Taylor.
The Purple Insurgent, Frank W. Noxon.
Heart to Heart Talks with Men, J. Howe Adams.
Plots and Things, Kenneth Brown.
Side Talks with the Philistines.
Conducted by the East Aurora School of Philosophy.

Have you seen the Roycroft Quarterly? The “Stephen Crane”

number is attracting much attention and we believe it will interest
you. 25 cents a copy.

Entered at the Postoffice at East Aurora, New York, for

transmission as mail matter of the second class.
COPYRIGHT, 1896, by B. C. Hubbard.

NOTICE TO
Collectors of Artistic Posters.

On receipt of 10 cents we will send to any address, a copy of

our largely illustrated catalogue of 500 posters exhibited by “The
Echo” and “The Century.”
“The Echo” is the pioneer in fostering the poster in America. It
began its department of Poster-Lore in August, 1895, and has
printed it fortnightly, with many illustrations, ever since.
Each issue of “The Echo” bears a poster design, in two or
more colors, on its cover. During the past year seven of these
covers were by Will H. Bradley.
“The Echo” is $2.00 a year, 10 cents a number. New York, 130
Fulton Street.

LOOK OUT for the second and popular edition of “Cape of

Storms,” price 25 cents. One sent free with every year’s
subscription to “The Echo.”

THE LOTUS.
A Miniature Magazine of Art and Literature Uniquely Printed and
Illustrated.
 A graceful flower.—Rochester Herald.
It is a wonder.—Chicago Times-Herald.
The handsomest of all the bibelots.—The Echo.
Alone in its scope and piquancy.—Boston Ideas.
Artistic in style and literary in character.—Brooklyn Citizen.
The prettiest of the miniature magazines.—Syracuse Herald.
Each bi-weekly visit brings a charming surprise.—Everybody.
The Lotus seeks to be novel, unconventional and entertaining
without sacrificing purity and wholesomeness. It seeks to be a
medium for the younger writers.
The Lotus is published every two weeks and is supplied to
subscribers for One Dollar a year; foreign subscription, $1.25.
Sample copy five cents. On sale at all news stands.
THE LOTUS, Kansas City, Mo.

The Roycroft Quarterly:

Being a Goodly collection of Literary Curiosities obtained from

Sources not easily accessible to the average Book-Lover. Offered
to the Discerning every three months for 25c. per number or one
dollar per year.
Contents for May:
I. Glints of Wit and Wisdom: Being replies from sundry Great Men
who missed a Good Thing.
II. Some Historical Documents by W. Irving Way, Phillip Hale and
Livy S. Richard.
III. As to Stephen Crane. E. H. A preachment by an admiring
friend.
IV. Seven poems by Stephen Crane.

1—The Chatter of a Death Demon.

2—A Lantern Song.
3—A Slant of Sun on Dull Brown Walls.
4—I have heard the Sunset Song of the Birches.
5—What Says the Sea?
6—To the Maiden the Sea was Blue Meadow.
7—Fast Rode the Knight.

V. A Great Mistake. Stephen Crane. Recording the venial sin of a

mortal under sore temptation.
VI. A Prologue. Stephen Crane.
 THE PHILISTINE.

no. 2. July, 1896. vol. 3.

 A SEA SONG.
Away with care! Away with grief!
Hurrah for life! Hurrah, we’re free!
Away with sorrow! Perish wrong!
Hurrah, Hurrah! The sea! The sea!
Yo ho, The waves are dashing,
Yo ho, The billows crashing,
Yo ho, The spray goes flashing
Down the bay.
Hurrah! The gulls are winging,
O’er bows the waves are flinging
The cooling, pelting, stinging,
Salt sea spray.
Away with care! Away with grief!
Hurrah for life! Hurrah, we’re free!
Away with sorrow! Perish wrong!
Hurrah, Hurrah! The sea! The sea!

F. W. Pickard.
 A BIT OF WAR PHOTOGRAPHY.
After the applause won by Mr. Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of
Courage, a little reaction is not strange; and this has already taken,
in some quarters, a form quite unjust and unfair. Certainly any one
who spent so much as a week or two in camp, thirty years ago,
must be struck with the extraordinary freshness and vigor of the
book. No one except Tolstoi, within my knowledge, has brought out
the daily life of war so well; it may be said of these sentences, in
Emerson’s phrase, “Cut these and they bleed.” The breathlessness,
the hurry, the confusion, the seeming aimlessness, as of a whole
family of disturbed ants, running to and fro, yet somehow
accomplishing something at last; all these aspects, which might
seem the most elementary and the easiest to depict, are yet those
surest to be omitted, not merely by the novelists, but by the
regimental histories themselves.
I know that when I first read Tolstoi’s War and Peace, The
Cossacks and Sevastopol, it seemed as if all other so-called military
novels must become at once superannuated and go out of print. All
others assumed, in comparison, that bandbox aspect which may be
seen in most military or naval pictures; as in the well known
engraving of the death of Nelson, where the hero is sinking on the
deck in perfect toilette, at the height of a bloody conflict, while every
soldier or sailor is grouped around him, each in spotless garments
and heroic attitude. It is this Tolstoi quality—the real tumult and
tatters of the thing itself—which amazes the reader of Crane’s novel.
Moreover, Tolstoi had been through it all in person; whereas this
author is a youth of twenty-four, it seems, born since the very last
shot fired in the Civil War. How did he hit upon his point of view?
Yet this very point of view, strange to say, has been called a
defect. Remember that he is telling the tale, not of a commanding
general, but of a common soldier—a pawn in the game; a man who
sees only what is going on immediately around him, and, for the
most part, has the key to nothing beyond. This he himself knows
well at the time. Afterward, perhaps, when the affair is discussed at
the campfire, and his view compared with what others say, it begins
to take shape, often mixed with all sorts of errors; and when it has
reached the Grand Army Post and been talked over afterward for
thirty years, the narrator has not a doubt of it all. It is now a
perfectly ordered affair, a neat and well arranged game of chess,
often with himself as a leading figure. That is the result of too much
perspective. The wonder is that this young writer, who had no way
of getting at it all except the gossip—printed or written—of these
very old soldiers, should be able to go behind them all, and give an
account of their life, not only more vivid than they themselves have
ever given, but more accurate. It really seems a touch of that
marvelous intuitive quality which for want of a better name we call
genius.
Now is it a correct criticism of the book to complain, as one writer
has done, that it does not dwell studiously on the higher aspects of
the war? Let the picture only be well drawn, and the moral will take
care of itself; never fear. The book is not a patriotic tract, but a
delineation; a cross section of the daily existence of the raw
enlisted-man. In other respects it is reticent, because it is truthful.
Does any one suppose that in the daily routine of the camp there
was room for much fine talk about motives and results—that men
were constantly appealing, like Carlyle’s Frenchman, “to posterity
and the immortal Gods?” Fortunately or unfortunately, the Anglo
Saxon is not built that way; he errs on the other side; habitually
understates instead of overstating his emotions; and while he is
making the most heroic sacrifices of his life, usually prefers to scold
about rations or grumble at orders. He is to be judged by results;
not by what he says, which is often ungracious and unornamental,
but by what he does.
The very merit of this book is that in dealing with his men the
author offers, within this general range, all the essential types of
character—the man who boasts and the man who is humble—the
man who thinks he may be frightened and is not, and the man who
does not expect to be, but is. For his main character he selects a
type to be found in every regiment—the young man who does not
know himself, who first stumbles into cowardice, to his own
amazement, and then is equally amazed at stumbling into courage;
who begins with skulking, and ends by taking a flag. In Doyle’s
Micah Clarke the old Roundhead soldier tells his grandchildren how
he felt inclined to bob his head when he first heard bullets whistle,
and adds “If any soldier ever told you that he did not, the first time
that he was under fire, then that soldier is not a man to trust.” This
is putting it too strongly, for some men are born more stolid, other
more nervous; but the nervous man is quite as likely to have the
firmer grain, and to come out the more heroic in the end. In my own
limited experience, the only young officer whom I ever saw
thoroughly and confessedly frightened, when first under fire, was
the only one of his regiment who afterwards chose the regular army
for his profession, and fought Indians for the rest of his life.
As for The Red Badge of Courage, the test of the book is in the
way it holds you. I only know that whenever I take it up I find
myself reading it over and over, as I do Tolstoi’s Cossacks, and find it
as hard to put down. None of Doyle’s or Weyman’s books bear re-
reading, in the same way; you must wait till you have forgotten their
plots. Even the slipshod grammar seems a part of the breathless life
and action. How much promise it gives, it is hard to say. Goethe says
that as soon as a man has done one good thing, the world conspires
against him to keep him from doing another. Mr. Crane has done one
good thing, not to say two; but the conspiracy of admiration may yet
be too much for him. It is earnestly to be hoped, at least, that he
may have the wisdom to stay in his own country and resist the
temptation to test his newly-found English reputation by migrating—
an experiment by which Bret Harte has been visibly dwarfed and
Henry James hopelessly diluted.
T. W. Higginson.
Cambridge, Mass.
 A PROLOGUE.
A GLOOMY STAGE. SLENDER CURTAINS AT A WINDOW, CENTRE.
BEFORE THE WINDOW, A TABLE, AND UPON THE TABLE, A LARGE
BOOK, OPENED. A MOONBEAM, NO WIDER THAN A SWORD-BLADE,
PIERCES THE CURTAINS AND FALLS UPON THE BOOK.
A MOMENT OF SILENCE.
FROM WITHOUT, THEN—AN ADJACENT ROOM IN INTENTION—
COME SOUNDS OF CELEBRATION, OF RIOTOUS DRINKING AND
LAUGHTER. FINALLY, A SWIFT QUARREL. THE DIN AND CRASH OF
A FIGHT. A LITTLE STILLNESS. THEN A WOMAN’S SCREAM. “AH, MY
SON, MY SON.”
A MOMENT OF SILENCE.
CURTAIN.
Stephen Crane.
 A HOT WEATHER IDYLL.
The new assistant sat in the office, vainly endeavoring to discourage
the perspiration in its efforts to show him how the water comes
down at Lodore. But, with a perseverance worthy a wetter cause
than the dry weather, it continued to flow from his mobile brow and
neck, mop he never so well. The thermometer on the wall registered
89, and the calendar only May 1st. It was the new assistant’s first
day in the office, and he had already begun to contemplate with
humid horror the prospect of spending an entire summer in a place
that was already warm enough to have caused his once stiff and
glossy collar to emulate his puff-bosom shirt.
“Why,” he gasped to the Old Book-keeper, “what will it be when
summer really comes?”
The latter, who had been a cent short in his cash the night before,
gruffly replied that it would probably be June 1st. But, before the
day was over, he, too, was forced to realize the heat and to speak of
it. So, when his face began to assume the appearance of a greasy
plank under a hydrant, he concluded that it might not be so great a
compromise to his dignity for him to agree with his junior, and his
looks showed him to be rapidly thawing. They managed to survive
that day and the next and several others that followed. In the
meantime the thermometer seemed bent, in fact, warped, upon
beating all previous records, and the two sufferers watched the
mercury climb, until it seemed to be trying to reach its Olympian
namesake. The thought that the worst was to come served to
increase their distress. It always does.
Finally, the Old Book-keeper, who occupied a sort of oldest
inhabitant position in the neighborhood, although he had always
worked for a living, threw up the sponge and reluctantly admitted
that, for so early in the season, it really beat all the weather he ever
saw. The new assistant sympathized with the old man in his defeat,
and went so far in his efforts to cheer him, as across the street to
buy the beer, without first proposing to match for it.
So affairs went on, nothing worthy of note transpiring, except, of
course, the two now becoming warm friends. Every morning and
again after lunch they would enter the office, take off their coats and
everything else that Mr. Comstock might not object to, and drearily
settle down to their work, always wondering if they would be able to
stand it when summer really came. By this time, they had ceased to
consult the thermometer, and the calendar was forgotten. Several
pages that should have been torn from the latter remained there
still: not enough air was stirring to move them. At last, one
afternoon just as the new assistant had succeeded in opening his
attenuated countenance wide enough to say, as usual—“I wonder
what it will be when summer really”—the door was suddenly
darkened by a portly form enveloped in a heavy overcoat and a
confident manner that unmistakably stamped their wearer as the
Boss, and a hearty voice exclaimed—“Well, this bracing weather is
delightful after a hot summer on the Riviera!” The Old Book-keeper
and the new assistant staggered to the door and looked out. The
snow was falling thick and fast.
Estes Baker.
Knoxville, Tenn.
 A VENTURE IN MANUSCRIPT.
Having finished some literature I put it into an envelope, with
postage stamps to get it back; for that happened sometimes, even
when it was real, hand-made literature, as in this case. It came
back, because the editor of the Bugle said it was too long. I sat up
that night paring and changing, and when it had been condensed a
third it occurred to me that maybe there was a surer market for it in
the office of the Banner of Freedom. Another try; more postage
stamps. Returned with statement that “We never print stories less
than 6,000 words long and yours is too short.” I rewrote it in part,
restoring an episode on which I had slightly prided myself in the
original version, and as it was neither long nor short I sent it, this
time to Tomlinson’s Bi-Monthly. Tomlinson kept it for nearly two
years before returning it, and it reached me a veritable tramp of a
manuscript, dusty, creased, dog-eared and ragged, with editorial
changes in blue pencil that could not be erased, and the remark
that, as Tomlinson’s circulated largely among the Bulgarians in
America, and received advertising patronage from them, it was
impossible to print anything that might offend Bulgarians. This
surprised me, because the fact that one of my characters, Gilhooly
McManus, was a Bulgarian had nearly escaped my notice. He was
introduced because his nationality made occasion for an incident
that I needed, and had he been an American every reader would
have denounced his conduct as absurd.
There was nothing for it but to copy it afresh and send it to
Bloxam’s. It was returned in the next mail, manifestly unread, with
the usual form announcement that “owing to pressure” etc., it was
impossible, etc., so I tried The Pacific with it next. It came back in
time with the objection that it was too sensational, and the next
week it was returned by the Chambermaid’s Own as too quiet.
Hanks’ Review would not have it because plots were going out of
fashion, and The Athenian suggested that I imbue it with at least a
trace of interest. At last a little one-horse magazine in Texas offered
to print it if I would subscribe for three years to his magazine at two
dollars per year. I accepted the offer by return mail, stipulating only
that the magazine should be sent, with my compliments, to an
almshouse.
And I set out on my next story wondering if the time would ever
come when a man could speak his mind to his fellow men in print, or
if all written things would have to be shaped according to the
Procrustean notions of the average editor.
Charles M. Skinner.
THE MICKETTS OF A WYBIRT.
Then with a touchbox of transalpine tar,
Turning thrice round, and stirring not a jot,
He threw five tons of red hot purple Snow,
Into a Pigmy’s mouth, nine inches square.
Which straight, with melancholy mov’d,
Old Bembus Burgomaster of Pickt-hatch,
That plunging through the Sea of Turnbull street,
He safely did arrive at Smithfield Bars.
Then did the Turntripes on the Coast of France,
Catch fifteen hundred million grasshoppers,
With fourteen Spanish Needles, bumbasted,
Poach’d with the Eggs of fourscore Flanders Mares.
Mounted upon the foot of Caucasus,
They whirled the football of conspiring Fate,
And brake the shins of smug-fac’d Mulciber:
With that, grim Pluto all in Scarlet blue,
Gave fair Persephone a kiss of Brass,
At which all Hell danc’d Trenchmore in a string.
Whilst Acheron and Termagant did sing,
“The Mold-warp,” all this while in white broth bath’d,
Did Carol Didoes happiness in love,
Upon a Gridiron made of whiting-mops,
Unto the tune of “John Come Kiss Me Now,”
At which Avernus Music ’gan to roar,
Enthron’d upon a seat of three-leav’d grass,
Whilst all the Hibernian Kernes in multitudes,
Did feast with Shamrocks stewed in Usquebaugh.
At which banquet made of didillary
Took great distaste, because the Pillory
Was hunger-starv’d for want of Villains ears,
Whom to relieve, there was a Mittimus,
Sent from Tartaria in an oyster boat,
At which the King of China was amaz’d,
And with nine grains of Rhubard, stellified,
As low as to the altitude of shame,
He thrust four Onions in a Candle-case,
And spoil’d the meaning of the world’s misdoubt.
Thus with a Dialogue of crimson Starch,
I was inflamed with a nun-cold fire,
Upon the tenterhooks of Charlemagne.
The Dogstar howl’d, the Cat a Mountain smil’d,
And Sisyphus drank Muscadel and eggs,
In the horn’d hoof of huge Bucephalus,
Time turn’d about, and show’d me Yesterday,
Clad in a Gown of mourning; had I wist,
The motion was almost too late they said,
Whilst sad despair made all the World stark mad;
They all arose, and I put up my pen,
It makes no matter, where, why, how, or when.

Ian Taylor.
 THE PURPLE INSURGENT.
Clangingharp told Frostembight the only prophetic way to write an
epic was to save all the rough drafts, with interlinear corrections. He
said your biographer could thus trace the growth of your work from
its earliest inception to its final bloom, and the photographic
reproductions would do away with the cost of sketches.
Frostembight said a man that would write an epic was a lunk-head.
Clangingharp started to get up and destroy Frostembight, but he
stepped on Marcus Aurelius, and with a rush of words to the throat
fell helpless into his chair. Marcus Aurelius was the cat. “Dam that
cat,” added Clangingharp.
One night when Clangingharp sat writing, an episode occurred.
Clangingharp couldn’t write on an empty stomach, and the verses he
made when he was sober were so drab and elegiac that in spite of
his remark to Frostembight he threw them away and went out after
cocktails. He could write shriller and hotter stuff when he had had
cocktails. Well, one night he sat thinking of what an empty thing a
cocktail is. He had been writing verses, and he knew they were
regrettable. But he did not go out and have cocktails. It might be
told why he didn’t, but what’s the use? You go to a comedy to get
away from your business troubles, and the chief clown constantly
thrusts under your nose a big wad of stage money. It would simply
be dragging in sordid matter that should have no place in a
psychological study. It is enough to say he didn’t go out. He sat and
plunked drops of purple ink from his pen into a blotter with an
insurance advertisement on it that lay submissively on the desk.
Then Marcus Aurelius leaped onto the blotter, and a fiendish shine
glittered dryly in the epicist’s eye. He noticed the cat was white.
Rainy afternoons on the fire-escape had made the beast very white.
Clangingharp plunked a drop of royal purple on the tip of Marcus
Aurelius’s tail.
 The next instant Clangingharp had written:
“And gave him hemorrhage of the soul.”
“Great!” he screeched in a seething cauldron of joy. “Powerful!”
He began to wonder whether or not cattails were as effective as
cocktails. He plunked another royal purple drop onto the cat’s tail,
and wrote another line. It was not so good as hemorrhage of the
soul, but it was pretty fair:
“And freshet-flushed his hydrant eye.”
For two weeks Clangingharp’s days and nights were dry. He did
not go out after cocktails, and as there was a drought on the fire-
escape the cat was becoming splendidly regal. The window was kept
open, for the weather was hot; but Marcus Aurelius got no
nourishment excepting an occasional mouse and what he absorbed
from the ink, so he staid in. Clangingharp would sit there for hours
and deliberately sling ink at him. Not a growl from Marcus. At last he
would take down the folding-bed, and before getting in would
remember the pen and wipe it along Marcus’s spine. Not a plaint
from the cat: always patient and forgiving.
The epic was growing. It had become so vast now that
Clangingharp had long since stopped saving rough drafts, and the
complete copy was piled up neatly on his desk. There was so much
that he had even ceased reading the whole of it through after
writing each new line. The evening came when Clangingharp felt
that he could finish the last canto. His heroine was about to get her
document so she could be married to the hero, and Clangingharp
felt that without stimulants he was scarcely up to writing the
heroine’s final spasm to the jury. It may as well be said here that
Clangingharp had been hearing from home lately, so he decided to
go out and have them for a last strain. He piled his manuscript
fondly on a corner of the desk, dipped his pen thoughtfully into the
ink-well, and gazing abstractedly at Marcus, plunked the whole
penful into a mute Aurelian eye.
 When Clangingharp got back he had had several of them, so at
first he did not quite take in what had happened. It seemed to him
as if much greater cohesion and consistency had been imparted to
the epic by the insertion interlinearly as well as between the pages,
of his pot of mucilage. Illustrations had also been sketched over the
sheets with the unbridled ink-bottle. The work as a whole had begun
to circulate, and was already widespread in its influence. Much of it
looked as if the critics had already been at it. Clangingharp stepped
to the window and looked out. Golden light from the window in a
first-floor flat shone brightly over the bottom of the air-shaft. There,
curled up on the cement, lay Marcus Aurelius, a study in purple and
dead.
“Dam that cat!” said Clangingharp.
Frank W. Noxon.
HEART TO HEART TALKS WITH MEN
QUERY ONE.
Whom do you consider the greatest living litterateur?
Formerly, this matter was in doubt; but there can be no dispute
over this point in recent years. But, unfortunately, both good taste
and modesty prevent me from making a more definite reply.

QUERY TWO.
I notice you frequently refer to Henry Ward Beecher as a great
man; will you kindly state why you consider him such?
Mr. Beecher acquired some reputation in Brooklyn a few years ago
as a preacher; this contributed somewhat to his fame. His principal
claim to greatness, however, rests on his wonderful power of
recognizing genius in others. He early saw the advantage of seeking
out and connecting himself with the great geniuses of his
neighborhood. I need scarcely add that I was raised in Brooklyn, and
that he was among my first admirers.

QUERY THREE.
Should a young man smoke cigarettes?
I notice on glancing over our advertisement columns, that the
cigarette trust has given up its devilish attempt to make our
American women nicotine habitues, so I will divert from my usual
plan of never referring to myself, and tell you my own experience as
a reply to this question.
 Ten years ago this very day, a large cigarette firm in New York City
offered me ten thousand dollars a year if I would smoke their brand
of these death-dealing instruments of the evil one. I was very very
young at the time; this is my explanation of my only great
temptation. I confess that I did not see the horror, the degradation
in this suggestion; I saw only in the offer the gold. I am changed
now, but, then, it was a fierce battle. But my mother plead with me,
and she made me promise never even to think of such a wicked
thing again. See the result. I now edit the largest journal in the
world, and am educating the women of America what to do and how
to do it. This lesson teaches you to do always as your mother tells
you. Some day you may edit the Homely Ladies’ Journal, and then
you can catch the sympathies of your readers with this sentiment,
without fear of your conscience keeping you awake at nights.

QUERY FOUR.
Which of our great poets do you consider led the happiest lives?
Whittier and Tennyson, because they were so blessed with great
friendships. I knew them both well myself.
I shall never forget that glorious day in London, when Tennyson
told me, with tears in his eyes, that his only regret was that he had
written himself out before I had taken charge of the Homely Ladies’
Journal; while Whittier, the dear old chap, told me his fiery war
songs that brought him social ostracism, need never have been
written had I edited the Woman’s House Journal during that period.

QUERY FIVE.
Do you find editing such a great journal as the Woman’s House
Journal hard work? It must be, for I find it very hard to edit properly
my own little country weekly.
 This question it is almost impossible to answer; to you my work
would seem Herculean, unceasing, impossible; but to me it is so
different that I feel that I cannot answer this question to make
myself intelligible. This question is doubly difficult to answer, for I
have systematized my work by establishing a drag net for getting
material. I will explain my method. I take up the latest magazine; I
see a story by some new great writer, a society leader in the
metropolis. Presto! I order a series of articles on “How Women
Should Behave at Teas” from her pen. I hear that a great English
novelist is coming over to seek the American dollar; again, as with
lightning, I order an article “How Your Women Impress Me.” It is
immaterial to me what they actually do write, or how far they
wander from their text, so long as they use my ready made titles.
They look so nice in the index.
In this way, I use the small talk of the writers as a soft food for
my readers. Just as you attempt, in your feeble way, to serve up the
gossip of your little hamlet in your weekly paper, so I do; for I tell
you in confidence what women want is not literature, not art, not
science, but gossip. So I make all the great writers of the day write
gossip for them. This is the secret of my success. You should feel
very happy now, for, although my thoughts and pen fly with
lightninglike rapidity, I have spent five hundred dollars’ worth of time
in answering your inquiry.
I will answer the rest of my anxious readers as soon as I can
systematize other incidents in my very short but successward career.
In the meantime, young men by following the lines laid down in this
paper cannot fail of success, real, pure, noble success.
J. Howe Adams.
 PLOTS AND THINGS.
UNFORBIDDEN FRUIT.
I have a plot:—A man and a girl in a boarding house in Duesseldorf
were rather sweet on each other. It might have become love and a
marriage, since they were the only Americans there, were both to
stay all summer, and both attractive.
The romance began well, they even got so far that one day he
held her hand and leaned forward, gazing deeply into her eyes.
Just then the Frau Professorin who kept the pension stepped
suddenly into the parlor, saw them, and retreated precipitately.
Here was a catastrophe. Her reputation according to German
ideas, gone. “Ein junges Maedchen sich se zu eenehmen—
abschenlich!” Nothing but an engagement could excuse the holding
of the hand of a junges Maedchen by a man.
They looked at each other and laughed, ruefully. Then they agreed
to become engaged, temporarily: what in Virginia is known as “just
engaged,” in contradistinction to “engaged to be married.”
For a time it was good fun. He was more devoted than ever; and
they even thought of making it permanent. But you know how
people act in Germany. Every time he came into the parlor, whoever
was sitting beside her, jumped up, and he had to go over and sit
beside her. Then he had to make pretty speeches to her while all the
other boarders, with German tact, stopped talking and listened.
The man and the girl carried out their roles well, though they
drew the line at having their picture taken with their arms around
each other. This was a great disappointment to the other boarders.
Neither the man nor the girl was able to talk to any one in the house
except about the girl and the man. It got to be boresome after a
while.
When at last they left Duesseldorf, the joy with which they flew
asunder was something to see. There my plot and the romance end.
Of course there were to be chaperones and scenery.

WHICH SINNED?
I was confessor; my cousin or Miss Hart was sinner (each has
confessed on the other); the story is about this:—
He stood opposite her in the waltz quadrille. He did not know her,
but thought what a pretty girl that was in the pink dress, and
wondered if I knew her. (I was in one of the side couples.)
At “Ladies half change,” he reached out his hand with eagerness
and she gave hers without reluctance. When they stood in their
places again, he continued to hold hers, instead of dropping it as he
might. (This may have been absent-mindedness.) Presently she
turned to him, smiling, and glanced down at their hands. He smiled,
too. Then she withdrew her hand, but without apparent offense.
Just then the order came, “Forward and back.” He reached out his
hand for hers, saying, sotto voce, “You see, you might as well have
let me keep it.”
This was all the preliminary skirmishing. The question of veracity
comes next.
After the dance my cousin came to me.
“Who was that pretty girl opposite me?” He said.
“What girl?” I asked.
“The one in pink: who was to your right: and danced with the man
in the wilted collar.”
“Ah! That was Miss Hart. Nice girl.”