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might rank above at least one or two

of these. I am speaking now only of instantaneous impressions as I write. Though the verse of the magazine was long ranked as high, of poems not one comes to my mind with just this insistent call for recognition.

It was astonishing, too, to note how the field of choice was still further narrowed by the many writers who were imitating some one else or were following the literary fashion of the hour, and that these imitations ran in cycles. The writers were mainly concerned not merely with being interesting or with picturing life vividly or sincerely, but with being interesting or with picturing life in the manner of certain forerunners who for the moment had captured the favor of the public. Though here and there a lone figure of talent might stand out like a rock above the flood, the vast body of ambitious young writers were merely parts of a dialect cycle, a Kipling cycle, a Davis cycle, and later a Conrad cycle, pouring down like the muddy flood of a river in spate.

A novel and extraordinary revelation of the tendency of authors to be moved by a common impulse was to astonish me upon my entrance into the magazine. Stockton had published his "The Lady, or the Tiger?" in THE CENTURY in the autumn of 1882, but when, nearly three years later, the task of reading nearly all the manuscripts that came to the office fell to me, sequels to the story were still coming in droves. At first I was interested, then amused, but finally moved to wonder if I was eventually to suffer the fate of that old victim of the Inquisition who was said to be bound down so immovably that the drops of water that fell on the same spot on his

forehead at regular intervals finally drove him to madness through his nervous horror of the monotonously recurring drip.

The publication of Mr. Stockton's own sequel, "The Discourager of Hesitancy," in the magazine for July, 1885, caused no abatement, for it had been written with his tongue in his cheek, and was not really a sequel at all, but the springing of a new problem. Nor were the writers of sequels moved by Mr. Stockton's publicly expressed belief that no man could decide whether the lady or the tiger came out of the door, and any attempt would do no more than show what manner of man he himself was. Fully five years must have passed before such sequels finally ceased to appear upon my desk.

But though many writers tried to solve the problem set by his most famous tale, I can recall few, if any, who ever attempted to imitate his manner. I recall, however, one imitation of an explanation of his peculiar vein of whimsicality. At some time in the eighties Dr. Edward Eggleston had said that Mr. Stockton possessed a "chamber in his brain" that was lacking in other people. He had jokingly used the figure of speech to explain the unusual quality of Stockton's humor, but many years later, when "The White Linen Nurse" was to divide our office force into warring camps, I was amused to hear the admirers of the story gravely declare that its author had a "lobe in her brain" denied to others. In this latter case the physiological abnormality appeared to its discoverers to be a sort of charm to ward off the evil eye and silence criticism. One could not reasonably decry the work of an author whom Nature

It

had thus singularly endowed. It smacked of irreverence.

Mr. Stockton had been a member of the editorial staff of the magazine at its founding in 1870, later becoming the associate editor of "St. Nicholas," but he had left the company to engage in literary work before I entered it. I knew him, therefore, only as a later and welcome visitor. He was a small, slight man, somewhat lame, and I recall clearly the manner in which he used to make his appearance, coming quietly into the room and slipping, in a sidelong way peculiar to himself, into the chair that stood by my desk, just inside the door. His features were strong, his eyes dark and unusually large, and his voice was grave, deep in tone, even musical. His face in repose was sad, and had about it the drawn look of those who know habitual pain, though I am sure that he always spoke of himself as being in the best of health. His laugh, though hearty at times, had the peculiar characteristic of being almost soundless.

How clearly the figures of those I knew long ago come back! Every line and change of their faces, every pose and habitual movement, seems indelibly stamped on my mind; as if Nature, relenting of her harshness in dulling my ears to their ephemeral words, had given to my eyes and brain the far more desirable power of visualizing their material forms in a sort of immortal changelessness.

For three of those early years I occupied in Nutley, New Jersey, a house in which Mr. Stockton had formerly dwelt, and the coincidence gave us a ground of common interest that otherwise we should not have had. Though he was in a way much of a wanderer in choosing his habitation,

he was always eager to hear of the friends and associations we had in common. "The boarder" of "Rudder Grange" still dwelt in Nutley in my time, and I knew him well, for though Rudder Grange, the canal-boat dwelling, was a mere fancy, the characters with whom Stockton had peopled his dream habitation were not.

Realities, too, were the ingenious devices which he used to divert himself, and my neighbors at Nutley, his old friends, told me of some that formerly had added to the comfort or interest of the house in which I then lived. There was no furnace in it at that time, but Mr. Stockton had run wires from his bedroom to the kitchen range, and at a seasonable hour in the morning his manipulation of them from his bed would open the draft and damper, and hasten by that much the process of getting breakfast. There was a small barn in the rear of the yard, one end of which was boarded off for a roost and shelter for his fowl. Between the roost and hen-yard he had fashioned a unique sliding-door, made to drop through grooves to the ground of the hen-yard when it was opened. At night, when his fowl had gone to roost, Mr. Stockton would raise the door over the opening, adjust a wire spring at the top to an attachment on an alarm-clock that was placed on the wall adjacent, set the clock at the hour he thought a proper one for fowl to go forth in the morning, and then retire to the house secure in the thought that his chickens were safe from nightprowling cats or weasels, but would be mechanically released by the clock when all danger was passed.

His jokes and his conversation, always grave, took on at times something of the fantastically matter-of

fact characteristics of his tales, and in his intercourse with children, his readiness to meet them half-way in the make-believe world where children love to wander must have presented him to their eyes in much the aspect of a Peter Pan.

In the spring of 1888, I think, a quiet, unassuming person who had already passed her first youth came into the editorial rooms early one morning and asked to see Mr. Gilder. She bore in her hand the unmistakable manuscript that was the natural accompaniment of strange visitors, and from its size one readily assumed that it was a novel, the one form of literary venture on the part of an unknown bearer against which all the chances of success are the greatest. I was alone in the main editorial room, but the visitor would neither leave her manuscript with Miss Demarest, the usual depositary of such come-by-chance offerings, nor, on Miss Demarest's suggestion, would she speak to me about it. She would wait for Mr. Gilder, she declared, and thereupon seating herself in the entrance-room, she patiently lingered till he came.

It was perhaps one o'clock when, on entering the elevator to go out to luncheon, I heard hastening footsteps behind me, and pausing to look back, saw Mr. Gilder. He was clearly elated and somewhat excited.

"If I had been told last night," he said as I followed him into the elevator, "that I might meet at the office to-day an unknown person and read and accept her novel before noon, I should have laughed at the prediction as a mad impossibility."

Yet that is what he had done. The stranger was Mrs. Mary Hartwell Catherwood, and the novel was "The

Romance of Dollard," a romantic historical tale of Canada in the year 1660. Within nine years the author was to write for us two other historical novels of worth, "The White Islander" and "The Days of Jeanne D'Arc." The same quiet persistence with which Mrs. Catherwood had declined to leave her manuscript with Miss Demarest drove Mr. Gilder to read the first pages of her romance at once. That read, the beauty of the tale carried him on to the swift end.

I was to make a discovery of my own of a very different sort in my early days at the office. One morning I found in the mail a letter from a young man who announced his faith in himself as one having in him the possibilities of becoming a great poet. He expressed the modest ambition to defray his expenses through college by means of his verse, and with this end in mind he offered for our acceptance a poem that he confidently appraised as the best that he had yet written. It was also one of the best that William Cullen Bryant had written, for, with only the substitution of half a dozen words, it was an exact copy of "Thanatopsis.' Now, "Thanatopsis" was one of the many poems that I had been obliged to commit to memory at school as penalties for misconduct that had not risen to the importance of deserving a thrashing, and I was still letter-perfect in the text. Therefore it pleased me to place the original words above the substitutions, and return the manuscript without further comment.

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In the magazine for April, 1886, in the height of the interest in the War Series, appeared the article, "Life on the Alabama," written, as the heading stated, "by one of the crew." It was one of the most interesting stories of

the whole series, a well written, vivid, and circumstantial account of life aboard the famous raider from the time of her setting out on her devastating career in July, 1862, until the day of her destruction by the Kearsarge off Cherbourg, France, on June 19, 1864. The closing of the article was strikingly good, a cool, care-free, philosophical picture befitting the nonchalance one expects of a sailor. Five minutes after the Alabama went down, the writer, as he relates, was rescued from the sea "when a French pilot-boat came running past, and a brawny fellow in petticoats and top-boots dragged me out of the water." In reality he was "rescued" by having the good fortune not to be there at all. The magazine for March, 1887, had the following note:

"Since the February number of the magazine went to press we have learned, for the first time, from his own admission, that 'P. D. Haywood,' the author of the article 'Life on the Alabama-By one of the Crew,' which appeared in THE CENTURY for April, 1886, was not a seaman on the Confederate cruiser, though at the time the article was accepted he assured us he was, and furnished references which seemed to be satisfactory. He now He now claims that he had the incidents of his paper from a member of the Alabama's crew, but we are unable to attach any importance to that statement, and shall omit his article from the war papers when they are republished in book form.-EDITOR.”

were not rare, though we were happily preserved from another disaster so complete as the once just related.

Thinking it useless to do more than add the name of the culprit to our "black list," I fell into the way of returning stolen matter without comment, simply inclosing a printed slip of rejection. Once, however, the practice gave me a bad quarter of an hour; for one day I found in the mail a letter in which the writer stated that he was a student at one of our most important universities, he gave the name,—and in conjunction with a classmate he had recently sent us a poem to prove that we knew nothing about poetry. He said the poem had been returned with a mere slip of rejection, and he appeared to think that his judgment concerning our knowledge was proved when, with many exclamation-points, he declared that the poem he had sent had been copied from Shelley. Now, though I could have pointed out in Shelley's work much that I could have called sad stuff without any loss of literary self-respect, I did not like the situation. The young man gave me no clue to the poem he had sent, and he had not signed his name to his exclamatory epistle, so I tried to believe that there was nothing true in his story. I did resolve, however, never again to return a palpably stolen manuscript without some reference to the theft, though the decision hardly seemed to cover a case like his, where I had possibly returned a masterpiece

Indeed, plagiarism and deception without knowing it.

(The end of the eighth part of "As I Saw It from an Editor's Desk.")

M

Millie

BY KATHERINE MANSFIELD

ILLIE stood leaning against the veranda until the men were out of sight. When they were far down the road, Willie Cox turned round on his horse and waved. But she did n't wave back. She nodded her head a little and made a grimace. Not a bad young fellow, Willie Cox, but a bit too free and easy for her taste. Oh, my word! it was hot! Enough to fry your hair! Millie put her handkerchief over her head and shaded her eyes with her hand. In the distance, along the dusty road, she could see the horses, like brown spots dancing up and down; and when she looked away from them and over the burned paddocks, she could see them still, just before her eyes, jumping like mosquitos.

It was half past two in the afternoon. The sun hung in the faded blue sky like a burning mirror, and away beyond the paddocks the blue mountains quivered and leaped like the

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shot bang through the head, and the young English "johnny" who'd been on the station learning farming-disappeared. Funny! She would n't think of any one shooting Mr. Williamson, and him so popular and all. My word! when they caught that young man! Well, you could n't be sorry for a young fellow like that. As Sid said, if he was n't strung up, where would they all be? A man like that does n't stop at one go. There was blood all over the barn. And Willie Cox said he was that knocked out he picked a cigarette up out of the blood and smoked it. My word! he must have been half dotty!

Millie went back into the kitchen. She put some ashes on the stove and sprinkled them with water. Languidly, the sweat pouring down her face and dropping off her nose and chin, she cleared away the dinner, and, going into the bedroom, stared at herself in the fly-specked mirror, and wiped her face and neck with a towel. did n't know what was the matter with herself that afternoon. She could have had a good cry just for nothing, and then change her blouse and have a good cup of tea. Yes, she felt like that!

She

She flopped down on the side of the bed and stared at the colored print on the wall opposite, "Garden Party at Windsor Castle." In the foreground,

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