lebrations, to make after-dinner speeches, to send
money for objects he does not believe in to places he never heard of.

"'He is called on to keep up correspondences with unknown admirers, who
begin by saying they have no claim upon his time, and then appropriate it
by writing page after page, if of the male sex; and sheet after sheet, if
of the other.

"'If a poet, it is taken for granted that he can sit down at any moment
and spin off any number of verses on any subject which may be suggested
to him; such as congratulations to the writer's great-grandmother on her
reaching her hundredth year, an elegy on an infant aged six weeks, an ode
for the Fourth of July in a Western township not to be found in
Lippincott's last edition, perhaps a valentine for some bucolic lover who
believes that wooing in rhyme is the way to win the object of his
affections.'

"Is n't it so? I asked the Celebrity.

"'I would bet on the prose lover. She will show the verses to him, and
they will both have a good laugh over them.'

"I have only reported a small part of the conversation I had with the
Literary Celebrity. He was so much taken up with his pleasing
self-contemplation, while I made him air his opinions and feelings and
spread his characteristics as his laundress spreads and airs his linen on
the clothes-line, that I don't believe it ever occurred to him that he
had been in the hands of an interviewer until he found himself exposed to
the wind and sunshine in full dimensions in the columns of The People's
Perennial and Household Inquisitor.'"

After the reading of this paper, much curiosity was shown as to who the
person spoken of as the "Literary Celebrity" might be. Among the various
suppositions the startling idea was suggested that he was neither more
nor less than the unexplained personage known in the village as Maurice
Kirkwood. Why should that be his real name? Why should not he be the
Celebrity, who had taken this name and fled to this retreat to escape
from the persecutions of kind friends, who were pricking him and stabbing
him nigh to death with their daggers of sugar candy?

The Secretary of the Pansophian Society determined to question the
Interviewer the next time she met him at the Library, which happened soon
after the meeting when his paper was read.

"I do not know," she said, in the course of a conversation in which she
had spoken warmly of his contribution to the literary entertainment of
the Society, "th