uccessful season it
had ever known. The Pansophian Society flourished to an extraordinary
degree under the fostering care of the new Secretary. The rector was a
good figure-head as President, but the Secretary was the life of the
Society. Communications came in abundantly: some from the village and
its neighborhood, some from the University and the Institute, some from
distant and unknown sources. The new Secretary was very busy with the
work of examining these papers. After a forenoon so employed, the carpet
of her room looked like a barn floor after a husking-match. A glance at
the manuscripts strewed about, or lying in heaps, would have frightened
any young writer away from the thought of authorship as a business. If
the candidate for that fearful calling had seen the process of selection
and elimination, he would have felt still more desperately. A paper of
twenty pages would come in, with an underscored request to please read
through, carefully. That request alone is commonly sufficient to condemn
any paper, and prevent its having any chance of a hearing; but the
Secretary was not hardened enough yet for that kind of martial law in
dealing with manuscripts. The looker-on might have seen her take up the
paper, cast one flashing glance at its title, read the first sentence and
the last, dip at a venture into two or three pages, and decide as swiftly
as the lightning calculator would add up a column of figures what was to
be its destination. If rejected, it went into the heap on the left; if
approved, it was laid apart, to be submitted to the Committee for their
judgment. The foolish writers who insist on one's reading through their
manuscript poems and stories ought to know how fatal the request is to
their prospects. It provokes the reader, to begin with. The reading of
manuscript is frightful work, at the best; the reading of worthless
manuscript--and most of that which one is requested to read through is
worthless--would add to the terrors of Tartarus, if any infernal deity
were ingenious enough to suggest it as a punishment.

If a paper was rejected by the Secretary, it did not come before the
Committee, but was returned to the author, if he sent for it, which he
commonly did. Its natural course was to try for admission into some one
of the popular magazines: into "The Sifter," the most fastidious of them
all; if that declined it, into "The Second Best;" and if that returned
it, into "The Omnivorous." If it was re