itiveness that the use of tobacco blunts the thought, dulls the
edge of invention; but Warrington knew better. Many a night he had
thrown his coat over his smoking-jacket and dashed down the street to
the corner drug-store for a fresh supply of tobacco. He simply could
not work without it. I do not know that he saw his heroes and heroines
any plainer for the smoke; but I do know that when their creator held
a cigar between his teeth, they frowned less, and the spirit of malice
and irony, of which he was master, became subdued.

Warrington was thirty-five now. The grey hair at the temples and the
freshness of his complexion gave him a singularly youthful appearance.
His mouth was even-lipped and rather pleasure-loving, which, without
the balance of a strong nose, would have appealed to you as
effeminate. Warrington's was what the wise phrenologists call the
fighting nose; not pugnacious, but the nose of a man who will fight
for what he believes to be right, fight bitterly and fearlessly.
To-day he was famous, but only yesterday he had been fighting,
retreating, throwing up this redoubt, digging this trench; fighting,
fighting. Poverty, ignorance and contempt he fought; fought
dishonesty, and vice, and treachery, and discouragement.

Presently he leaned toward the desk and picked up a letter. He read it
thoughtfully, and his brows drew together. A smile, whimsically sad,
stirred his lips, and was gone. It was written by a girl or a very
young woman. There was no signature, no address, no veiled request for
an autograph. It was one of those letters which bring to the novelist
or dramatist, or any man of talent, a real and singular pleasure. It
is precious because honest and devoid of the tawdry gilt of flattery.

Richard Warrington--You will smile, I know, when you read this letter,
doubtless so many like it are mailed to you day by day. You will toss
it into the waste-basket, too, as it deserves to be. But it had to be
written. However, I feel that I am not writing to a mere stranger, but
to a friend whom I know well. Three times you have entered into my
life, and on each occasion you have come by a different avenue. I was
ill at school when you first appeared to me. It was a poem in a
magazine. It was so full of the spirit of joyousness, so full of
kindliness, so rich in faith and hope, that I cried over it, cut it
out and treasured it, and re-read it often in the lonely hours when
things discouraged me,--things which