sented the the manner in which his "History of Abraham Lincoln" had been condensed in its passage through the magazine as a serial, and for a long while had refrained from visiting our office through the dread that in meeting the editors he might be betrayed into voicing his disapproval. Yet the impossibility of using a work containing a million words had been understood from the first, and no one who knew Mr. Gilder, who had personally abridged the manuscript, could have any doubt about the skill and judgment shown in the difficult task. Mark Twain, too, had been angered by our cutting of certain dubious passages in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," but, unlike Hay, had not hidden his wrath under a bushel. The feeling that we had shown only proper reserve in hiding under a bushel of our own the passages in question left us wholly unmoved. There was always the possibility that the author's flood of scorn at the stupidity of editors might lead him at last into so happy a witticism that his joy in creating it would restore him to good humor.

Few conscientious editors ever approach the task of condensing the work of an author without the greatest reluctance, for, as they have learned by hard experience, it is a characteristic of human nature that the black sheep of a family is ever remembered as potentially the dearest of all, the one most deplored-after its passing. Often when the lack of space has compelled me to remove a line or a sentence from a story or article, and after long and careful search I have taken out the one line or the one sentence the one brick in the buildingthat appeared the least necessary, the least colorful, the hopeless idiocy of

my selection has been revealed to me by the later lamentations of the author. The line, it seems, was the keystone of the whole structure, the sentence the one perfect sentence that the writer had laboriously polished into immortality. Well, if it was true, then the writer, like Emerson's genius, had "masked his king in weeds."

But antagonisms like these in the thankless task of editing or abridging the work of notable writers are rare, and Pleasure may often enter through the same dark door. When, in the spring of 1916, Phyllis Bottome's "The Dark Tower" came to the office, I read it with keen pleasure and urged its acceptance as a serial. After certain negotiations, in which I had no part, I was told that the novel was to be used in the magazine, but only after it had been condensed to two thirds of its original length. It was a task upon which I entered with foreboding of gloom until, early in June, I received from her a gracious letter the first two sentences of which read:

"Dear Mr. Tooker:

"It is quite impossible for me to thank you sufficiently for the wonderful skill with which you have handled "The Dark Tower.' It seems a little thing to say I could not have done it half as well myself, but I can honestly say that tho' I thought I knew the MS. pretty well, I hardly ever knew when you had condensed."

justice to the good manners of the writers who thus "called me out of my name," I must add that the remarks were not personal, but were directed at the head of the unknown creature, usually the "proof-reader," whose tinkering with their manuscripts had thus aroused their Homeric rage; and in justice to the necessity of the tinkering, that all, though still living so far as I know, long since vanished in the oblivion of ephemeral authors.

I certainly refuse to believe that the tinkering brought about their passing, for it was never so great as that would imply; but I am convinced that their refusal to consider suggestions with an equable mind did indicate the possession of a certain congenital self-satisfaction that would always stand as a barrier to their mental growth. Indeed, with some curiously constructed minds, it often stands as a barrier to truth itself. I recall the I recall the case of one contributor who, in making an impassioned plea for justice to one backward nation, referred to an event as having occurred in the fourth Crusade. Now, as it happened, the affair was an incident of the third Crusade, and, naturally, I corrected the statement. Noting the change in his proof, the author asked us to restore his "fourth," not on the ground that it was right, he frankly admitted that it was not, but for the extraordinary reason that an irrelevant little error like the one in question might serve to draw attention to the everlasting truth of his main theme! I recall, too, the writer who insisted that he was right in describing his seacaptain as fighting for his "easting," though voyaging from France to Cape Horn, and in declaring the "futtockshrouds" as a proper station for his

sailor when reefing a squaresail at night in a gale of wind. Somewhere in his reading, I presume, he had chanced upon certain pleasant-sounding names the nautical flavor of which had appealed to him, and he had incorporated them in his vocabulary of rockingchair misinformation of the sea.

But the author who flies into a passion at editorial changes is rare; he is far more likely to indulge in lamentations than in jeremiads. I remember the Ghetto-born Berliner, but long a resident of France, who, on viewing certain alterations in his moving little story, shaking his head sadly and slowly, said with deep feeling:

"I wish you would not the blacksmith employ on my watch of great delicacy!"

His Germanisms and Gallicisms had been delightfully quaint in the conversations of his old Hebrew scholar, but wholly out of place in the direct narrative of the story when predicates wandered far afield, and "onlys" were like lost dogs darting franticly through crowds in search of their masters.

Despairing, too, was the lament of the young writer who, while having nothing to say of the many misspelled words in her manuscript that we had corrected, of patent grammatical pitfalls from which we had rescued her, declared we had ruined her whole story, the first, so far as I know, that she had ever written, because we had changed her "Swift moved he to her," the one stilted phrase in a recital otherwise wholly conventional, to "He hurried to her," or some such harmless form, just what I have forgotten. I have forgotten because I let her have her way when she wrote, with eyes that I am sure were misty with tears, that she had "toiled and toiled

and toiled" to obtain the perfect rhythm of those magic five words, and then we had ruined it all! I hate to commit brutal murder with a mean lead-pencil.

Her lost rhythm was all that she sorrowed over, and because we "hopped upon his very choicest rhythms only to destroy them" was also the good-natured plaint of another writer of short stories. When he had "worked out a long sentence with a funny little cadence at the end of a delicate irregular lilt; and then for funny contrast began the next sentence harshly (a rasp, rasp raspity don't you hear it?) then❞—well, then we came along and destroyed all the beautiful "lilts" and "cadences" and "rhythms"! Unaccountably, it seems, rhythm has lately deserted verse, and has come to bed and board with prose.

Like these methods in a way were the esoteric devices of the storywriter who, having fallen a victim to the modern craze for the miraculous little rows of periods that are supposed to express all emotions and subtleties, but graciously leave to the befuddled reader the license to choose his own interpretation, insisted that we preserve exactly as she wrote it the sentence, "Should she marry him? and then, three lines later, "Should she marry him ?" The periods in the second case were to be larger and more widely spaced than in the first. The exact preservation of the differences the writer considered highly important.

But of all this temperamental brotherhood, the one I remember best of all was no modern breaker of images. Even before I had entered the office he had written a popular series of short stories, and until his death, many

years later, he was a frequent contributor. He had, as I say, no modern eccentricities of style; indeed, no eccentricities of any sort beyond a certain affectation of Gallic lightness: his foible was omniscience. He frequently came to the office, a big, handsome, likable fellow of much manner, with a deep, rumbling voice that, as he graciously came in through the outer room of our suite, preceded him through the door like the heralding drums of a procession. I do not recall that his objections to our changes ever irritated us, as certain querulous dogmatics sometimes do, for he was always courteous and affable, and about the naïveté of his self-constituted divinity there was something vastly humorous.

He always used to write at the head of his manuscript that not even a comma was to be changed in it, and though we disregarded his injunctions as to his punctuation, and heard no protests, the least verbal change was another story. Once we changed the spelling of a French word in his text, but on his proof he restored the original spelling, declaring in a marginal note that his form was correct. As he was, as I have said, always courteous in his insistence, we tried to be equally so in return, and in this case I sent the spelling of the word as given by Littré, Larousse, the dictionary of the French Academy, and minor lexicons, all of which agreed in supporting our form. supporting our form. It was useless. Without attempting to prove his contention, he merely declared that Littré had originally made the error, and had been blindly followed by the other lexicographers.

I broke the back of the camel with a straw at least I thought it was a

straw. When we were publishing an article of travel by him, I found in one instalment a long quotation from Sterne's "A Sentimental Journey." In the passage occurred the word "désobligeante," the post-chaise used by Sterne. In the author's quotation the word was written "desobligeante." In verifying the passage, I found that the copy I used had printed the word correctly, with the acute accent over the initial e, and I therefore corrected the word. In returning his proof the author insisted that he was right, and had copied the passage as Sterne had written it. In reply, Mr. Gilder sent him the copy of the book I had used in verifying the passage, and the author returned it with this note:

"Dear Mr. Gilder:

"This is a very pretty little copy of Sterne's 'Sentimental Journey' that you have sent me, but I notice that it was printed in 1891, and Sterne could not have read the proof. My copy was printed in 1792, and Sterne did read the proof of it."

Mr. Gilder called me into his room and gave me the note.

"Oh, let him have his way," he said. I read the note, and thought I saw a way out. It was all petty enough and not worth wasting a thought over, but he had always been so insistent about trifles that I in turn had become equally stubborn.

our copy of his book, printed in 1891, than the proof of yours, printed in 1792, since he died twenty-five years before even yours was published."

We had thought it a huge joke, and no one had for a moment doubted that his copy of Sterne was as old as he said and that its désobligeante had no accent,-even with the best of intentions such oversights are not wholly unknown even in our instructed time! -but he had been too certain of his omniscience to suppose that fate could play him so scurvy a trick as to remove Sterne so untimely, and he never forgave me. And I, too, was ill satisfied. I had come off second best in so many encounters with him that I felt the right to be a little aggrieved at his failure to accept with good temper my triumph. It appeared a picayune affair if the victim did not applaud.

It seemed, too, a picayune affair to concern oneself so greatly about trifles. But if one had standards, where was the point at which one could begin to break them without eventually coming to a state where one no longer had any standards at all? Liberty may easily become license, and license become chaos.

One can laugh at it all to-day, but once the contentions and doubts brought unquiet hours. It is so much pleasanter pleasing people! The gods and the half-gods of literature are

He consented, and after the verification of my suspicion I wrote:

"Dear Mr. X-:

"Mr. Gilder says that you are to have your way in regard to désobligeante, though we are nevertheless at a loss to understand how it could be any more difficult for Sterne to read the proof of

I

F you go among the Cornwalls in
Connecticut-North, East, South,

or West Cornwall, Cornwall Center, Cornwall Plains, Cornwall Bridge, or Cornwall Hollow-looking for Yankees of the sort thought of as quaint by summer visitors, you will not often find them. Once I thought I had found one; he, however, told me that the last true Cornwall Yankee had died some fifty years before. Certainly my nearest neighbor is not of the eccentric stock. Except for a few Doric touches in his speech, he might be a good and wise man of any age, withdrawn from the world to his native province.

Matthew Bradford is the fifth person of that name to own his land, which has never belonged to any person who was not named Matthew Bradford. In his youth this Matthew went to Waterbury and there built up a considerable trade in farm products, but he later lost so large a part of his fortune that he was obliged to retire to the homestead which he had hitherto maintained rather out of piety than out of any more profitable instinct. Since I have known him I have rarely seen him leave his house, though he goes now and then to church, to the village three miles away, and, in summer, to a spring in Cornwall Hollow for water which he prefers to that in his own well. Wifeless for a dozen years, and

childless, he has a lean, fussy housekeeper whose husband slackly does the work on the farm with the help of their half-grown boy. This tame menage the old man governs from his habitual seat, in all but the coldest weather, on the narrow porch from which he looks across a meadow beyond which are a swamp, a row of maples, gradual hills, and the sky.

Frail even when the sun shines, he almost hibernates during the bitter winter. Once I came to Cornwall in April, about some early prospects for my garden, and was shocked at the apathy into which he seemed to have sunk. He was not surly, of course, nor was he particularly silent, but he was not responsive in his usual degree. That grave voice which always charms me with its rich tone and its tempered diction might almost be coming, I felt on this occasion, out of a cave in which its possessor had taken refuge from the driving snow of which a few packed drifts still remained. Or rather, I perceived in a few moments, he was answering me from a deep region within himself where he had lived with his thoughts during a season when there was little else in his universe to distract him. Now he could not emerge instantly, but had slowly to unfold his senses to the sun. The image which his state suggested, I finally understood,