ert sat smoking
meditatively. After some moments the writer passed a letter over to the
smoker.

"Think it'll do?" he inquired.

Bert read the letter through carefully.

"Jeems," said he, after due deliberation, "Jeems, you're a blooming
genius."

James stamped the envelope.

"I'll mail it for you when I go out in the morning," Bert suggested.

"Not on your daily bread, sonny. It is posted now by my own hand. We
won't take any chances on _this_ layout, and that I can tell you."

He tramped down four flights and to the corner, although it was
midnight and bitter cold. Then, with a seraphic grin on his
countenance, he went to bed and slept the sleep of the just.

The envelope was addressed to a Mr. James Fay, Spanish Gulch, South
Dakota.

CHAPTER II

THE STORY-BOOK WEST

When a man is twenty-one, and has had no experience, and graduates from
a small college where he roomed alone in splendour, and possesses a
gift of words and a certain delight in reading, and is thrown into new
and, to him, romantic surroundings--when all these stars of chance
cross their orbits, he begins to write a novel. The novel never has
anything to do with the aforesaid new and romantic surroundings;
neither has it the faintest connection with anything the author has
ever seen. That would limit his imagination.

Once he was well settled in his new home, and the first excitement of
novel impressions had worn off, Bennington de Laney began to write
regularly three hours a day. He did his scribbling with a fountain pen,
on typewriter paper, and left a broad right-hand margin, just as he had
seen Brooks do. In it he experienced, above all, a delightful feeling
of power. He enjoyed to the full his ability to swing gorgeous involved
sentences, phrase after phrase, down the long arc of rhetoric, without
a pause, without a quiver, until they rushed unhasting up the other
slope to end in beautiful words, polysyllabic, but with just the right
number of syllables. Interspersed were short sentences. He counted the
words in one or the other of these two sorts, carefully noting the
relations they bore to each other. On occasions he despaired because
they did not bear the right relations. And he also dragged out,
squirming, the Anglo-Saxon and Latin derivations, and set them up in a
row that he might observe their respective numbers. He was uneasily
conscious that he ought, in the dread of college anathema, to use the
former, but he loved