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It was Mrs. Buckingham, and she entered with a pie in each hand. - Page 772. coal in the garden that it was becoming, as Henry said, an even worse give-away than the pie itself. We had to desist and close the window.

have taken just such a time to dine at the club and come home very late.

I remember that Mr. Gately exclaimed several times: "How droll! How very, very droll!" As we left the room to go down to breakfast he laughed outright, and immediately apologized, adding: "But reelly I can't help it-it is so very droll! Before Henry went to his office I told him that I was going in town to do some shopping, and that I should not come back until after he did. He looked at me a moment and said: " Well, I don't blame you.

You will find I am here when you come back." I have always thought this rather fine in Henry. Many men would

When I returned it was dark. I went upstairs in fear and trembling. As I approached our room I heard sounds of laughter, and of what I took to be jumping.

I opened the door, and there was Henry, all alone, dancing round the room and laughing like a lunatic.

"Look out of the window," he called "No. It's too dark. Never Fannie, I'll tell you. It's gone." "The pie?"

to me. mind.

"Sure.'

"But how?

"Removed."

"But who did it?"

"The Duchess and I-with a broom

and a step-ladder." Then he burst out

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laughing again.

"Oh, Henry!" I gasped. she?"

"Mad. Mad as a hornet," Henry answered, and I was amazed at his manner. It struck me as being almost triumphant. "But what-" I began.

Fannie," he said, "she thinks it was Gately's."

"And you didn't tell her?"

"Tell her nothing," said Henry, and I never saw a man more brazer in my life. "Of course I didn't tell her. I guess Gately can stand it. She said she knew it was Gately's pie. Said she should never mention the matter to him beneath her dignity, you know-but she knew it was Gately's pie. Confound it, she ought to know her own pies. How do I know it was my pie? Threw a pie, broadcast, in the night. Pie found in tree next day. Not necessarily my pie. Everybody in the house been throwing pie, for all I know. Come Fannie! Brace up!"

"Henry

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Gray," I said, "I should think you would feel like a criminal." Then I laughed. And the next I knew I was waltzing round the room with Henry as if we were a couple of children. Oh, dear! that's what it is to associate with a man who stifles his conscience.

That very night there was an informal parish-gathering to discuss the question of the new rector; and the gathering was followed by a meeting of the wardens and vestry, at which it was decided to call the Reverend Mr. Hurstwell, of Elmira, N. Y. I heard this the next day, and also heard that Mrs. Buckingham, who was present

at the gathering, had unaccountably changed from support of Mr. Gately to opposition to him. I was told, too, that she gave

as her reason for this sudden change her fear that, after all, Mr. Gately's character was hardly sufficiently formed to warrant his assuming more responsibility.

I cannot tell you how shuddery and depraved this made me feel. When Henry came home I begged him, with tears in my eyes, to go to Mrs. Buckingham and make a clean breast of it.

"My dear wife," he said, " don't bother about Gately. He told me himself, this afternoon, that he had received a call to a much better parish in a growing city in Minnesota. He is delighted, and will start for the West as soon as they can fill his place here. So let's say no more about it. Now I have some good news for you. I am going into partnership with Blackstone-he already has a good practice,

you know so we can move into town when he stopped suddenly and said :

and keep house."

And so we did.

All this was nearly twenty years ago. Henry is now senior warden of All Saints. Yesterday afternoon he came home with a very interesting piece of news. They had decided upon the new rector-and of all men in the world, it was to be Mr. Gately-our Mr. Gately. Henry went on to tell me that Mr. Gately was here, for the convention, and was coming to dine with us that evening. So was Major Hawley; and we would have a rubber, and talk over old times.

We were seated round the whist-table, after dinner, the Major and Mr. Gately playing against Henry and me. Mr. Gately, by the way, is just as coy as ever, but he has grown stouter and doesn't seem so helpless. The Major was dealing,

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Mr. Gately, what did you do with your pie?"

"I tossed it out of the window," replied Mr. Gately, mildly, "and it became lodged in the shrubbery." The Major went on dealing. Henry looked keenly at Mr. Gately for a moment, then glanced at me.

"I found yours, Gray," continued the Major, as he turned the trump, "found it the following March. It was intact, under the hedge, about fifty feet beyond the syringa bush."

I had led. Mr. Gately played a king second hand. Henry and the Major played low cards. Mr. Gately was gazing at the ceiling. His face wore a placid smile.

"You took the trick, Mr. Gately," said Henry, after a pause.

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DEAR L. I always grudge your absence, but just now I resent it fiercely. I am having the most amusing and most exasperating time I ever expect to have. The .comments on my first book are alternately convulsing me with mirth and driving me mad with their contradictoriness and their stupidity. If I live to write a second book and to have it published, I suppose I shall, by that time, either be dead to the humor of such a situation as my present one, and given over wholly to its exasperation, or else I shall take the affair altogether as a huge joke and look back upon my present irritation as the choler of immaturity.

One day, when I was hunting in the dictionary of quotations for an apt title to give a story, I found myself very much interested in the seven long columns given over to the subject "Fame." Beginning with Addison and following an alphabetical order down to Young, who, it seems, wrote something called "The Love of Fame," besides those "Night Thoughts" for which devo

VOL. XXII.-80

tees of quotation books imagine him chiefly famous-beginning with Addison and ending with Young, I say, men of all times and degrees and nations, of nearly all callings and all characters, united in decrying fame as a doubtful blessing or one of authenticated cussedness.

Tell it not in Gath, my dear, but I didn't take much stock in their railings. When Addison called the "fickle goddess" bad names I said, "His elderly wife had been making herself unbearable, perhaps;" and when Carlyle scoffed at the bauble, I set it down to an extra bad attack of dyspepsia, due, maybe, to an indiscreet intimacy with a Welsh rarebit or a cold pork pie.

Byron said, "Folly loves the martyrdom of fame," and I said, “Bah!" and determined to become famous if I could and defy the world to call me fool.

Comrade, I wish for you, that you might at my command call me bad names for my folly, for I have called them at myself un

til I have drained my vocabulary. Do you remember that the editor who took my story for serial publication in the greatest magazine, I suppose, that the world knows, said it had always been an unwritten doctrine of his that no woman could write a story about men which was fit for a man to read? And that he said my tale was the sole exception known to his experience? Well, this very morning a business man of my acquaintance took pains to inform me that no man had ever lived in fact as men live in my imagination. He said, moreover, that no such men ever would live, or ever could. He said, "That man Philip is not a hero." "I never labelled him heroic," I cried, somewhat hotly, be it confessed. "Then why did you put him in your book?" says my critic, with the abominable air of one who thinks he has you cornered, sure. "I put him in because he is a man," I returned, rather feebly, because my critic is so big and so beetle-browed that I was hardly sure that I had not put Philip in the book because he was a curiosity. "Ah, ha!" laughed my business-like tormentor, as if he could afford to be humorous, now that my discomfiture was evident. Wait till you're married before you write about men. You'll change your notions then." "You think I idealize men because I expurgate the scenes where they cuss their wives and throw rulers at the office-boy," I retorted, with rising spirits, because he seemed to me, by this time, to be a foe unworthy of my steel" but art, Mr. A., does not consist in telling all you know." Will extermination ever come to the species of reader who thinks that because a thing is in a book it is the author's dearest conviction? Why can't people understand that we're not telling how things ought to be, but trying to describe how things are; and why do they hold us responsible for the belief and foibles of the persons we write about, any more than those of the persons we live among? My but the wayfaring fool is a literal creature.

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rowed from life is the account of Grandmother's experience with the Blackhawk chief in 1837. She said, with fond pride, that I had told this almost as well as she could have told it herself. I felt that this was true, because this story is Grandmother's star performance, and I have heard her tell it one hundred times if I have heard her tell it once. Yet a reviewer on a Chicago daily paper-perchance a man who never had a grandma, and whose Chicago residence, mayhap, dates only four months back-says, with great conviction, that this whole incident is wildly improbable, not to say impossible, "and spoils the flavor of an otherwise rather neat little story." Ye gods and little fishes, L——, that I should live to have my work called "neat!" I'm a woman and squeamish, but I'd rather have "damnable," any day One review is funny, without any

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sting.

It doesn't mean to be complimentary, but it is. It is from a little religious paper with a circulation of about seven persons and a half, I should judge, and it says that when I, reported to be a Presbyterian, had need of a heroine to move in and out in ministry amid the hardships of frontier life, why need I have "made her" a Roman Catholic nun, instead of a Protestant woman-a Presbyterian spinster, I suppose they mean. Now I was proud that I, in spite of my Puritan blood, could have made so sweet a character out of Sister Mary Angela, and I thought I had taken my book out of the petty lines of the denominational or even local, and lifted it at least within the possibility of universality. But no! A Protestant paper condemns me for the presence of the nun, and a Catholic paper takes me rigorously to task for the unholy offence of letting the nun allow Philip to grow so fond of her as to kiss the hands that had ministered to him. This latter reviewer says I should have known, before I undertook to write about a nun, that holy women of the order I describe would not allow any earthly affection to attach itself to them. It is part of their vow not to. Woe's me! I didn't know there was any way for holy or unholy women to prevent such contingencies, except the way Nance Oldfield tried, and that frequently works just the other way.

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friend. Who was it said "Defend me from my friends"? This person writes to say that she has read my book and thinks it is "well enough in its way," but is sure I can do better. Now what an unchristian implication is this, sweet Horatio! Does she think I gave my sleepy hours to my first book? But no! She refers to an essay which I once wrote, an abominable thing, full of quotations and an air of "smartness," which was so thin that a child could have seen through it and discovered the absence of an idea beneath. This is her ideal. I daresay she calls it "sparkling," or even-most villanous epithet ever applied to an earnest woman"bright."

4. DEAR L. There are some things about fame that are not half bad. I've been asked for my photograph, not once, but by half a dozen papers and magazines. Perhaps I'm foolish, but I feel as if this were what we used, as children, to call "fun."

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5. . I enclose you a newspaper picture. If you know Professor Lombroso or any criminologist over in Europe you can send this to him as a type of the female offender." Someone has said that he would not feel easy about his stud and pocket-book in a crowd where a woman with that face was present. think it was Uncle David who made this choice criticism. You might submit the "thing" to an expert if you think Uncle David was mistaken in the kind of criminality it represents. Mother thinks it is more like the pictures of a certain Bridget Durgin who, in her young days, murdered her mistress and cut her up into little bits for boiling. I'm curious, now, to see the magazine portraits of myself. If they're anything like this one I should think it would create a demand among certain people to see what manner of book a person of such appearance would write. should think Pomona and her ilk would fancy my looks. They suggest pages on pages "all dripping with gore," and an unlimited number of evolutions from millgirls to duchesses.

I

6. . . . I have been interviewed! One day an undersized woman, with an oversized vocabulary, announced to me that she had been sent to interview me, and when I protested that I had nothing

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'Oh,

to say she cheerfully responded, that's all right. I'll help you out!" She did. She asked me where I was born, and when, what father does for a living and where mother's people came from. Asked if I wrote nights or mornings and if I ate candy while writing or was addicted to the wearing of any particular color of gown while the afflatus was on. Said genius was so sensitive to color, you know. Her friend, Miss D, whose last book sold eleven thousand copies on the day of publication, always wore pink when writing her love-scenes and yellow when the jealousy came in and red for killings and white for deathbeds, with, perhaps, a touch of black. Had I any such sensitiveness to the psychic values of colors? No, I shamefacedly replied, I hadn't. I sometimes forgot to dress especially for the Muse and was not even sure that at times I do not forget what I have on. She suppressed her probable horror at this state of affairs and proceeded to ask if I liked Ibsen, and when assured that I did not understand him at all fully, or sympathize very heartily with his symbolism and his pessimism, she said, "Oh !"and scribbled industriously for a few minutes on her pad. "Miss

S is a sworn foe to the school of symbolists," she began, presently reading from her paper, "she said of them 'I have no patience with Ibsen or Maeterlinck or any of those degenerates who, under the name of symbolism, violate all the canons of literary art and cheerful religion. I took up my pen expressly to controvert them and to prove that literature is essentially buoyant, and I think I may say that I have done this.' There!" she said, triumphantly," How's that?" "I never said any such thing!" I cried, indignantly. "How could you think I would assent to that?" "Oh, very well," returned my lady, icily, and tore up the manuscript, leaving the fragments on the parlor-floor as she swept out in cool disdain. the interview came out it stated that I am not a very well-read or intelligent person; that my manners are crude, not to say bad, and that it is not at all probable that I shall ever write another book which will amount to even so much as my first, though that is a temporary success due to meretricious advertising more

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