er waiting two whole weeks, Martin had written to
him. A week later he wrote again. At the end of the month, he went over
to San Francisco and personally called upon the editor. But he did not
meet that exalted personage, thanks to a Cerberus of an office boy, of
tender years and red hair, who guarded the portals. At the end of the
fifth week the manuscript came back to him, by mail, without comment.
There was no rejection slip, no explanation, nothing. In the same way
his other articles were tied up with the other leading San Francisco
papers. When he recovered them, he sent them to the magazines in the
East, from which they were returned more promptly, accompanied always by
the printed rejection slips.

The short stories were returned in similar fashion. He read them over
and over, and liked them so much that he could not puzzle out the cause
of their rejection, until, one day, he read in a newspaper that
manuscripts should always be typewritten. That explained it. Of course
editors were so busy that they could not afford the time and strain of
reading handwriting. Martin rented a typewriter and spent a day
mastering the machine. Each day he typed what he composed, and he typed
his earlier manuscripts as fast as they were returned him. He was
surprised when the typed ones began to come back. His jaw seemed to
become squarer, his chin more aggressive, and he bundled the manuscripts
off to new editors.

The thought came to him that he was not a good judge of his own work. He
tried it out on Gertrude. He read his stories aloud to her. Her eyes
glistened, and she looked at him proudly as she said:-

"Ain't it grand, you writin' those sort of things."

"Yes, yes," he demanded impatiently. "But the story--how did you like
it?"

"Just grand," was the reply. "Just grand, an' thrilling, too. I was all
worked up."

He could see that her mind was not clear. The perplexity was strong in
her good-natured face. So he waited.

"But, say, Mart," after a long pause, "how did it end? Did that young
man who spoke so highfalutin' get her?"

And, after he had explained the end, which he thought he had made
artistically obvious, she would say:-

"That's what I wanted to know. Why didn't you write that way in the
story?"

One thing he learned, after he had read her a number of stories, namely,
that she liked happy endings.

"That story was perfectly grand," she announced, straightening up from
the wash-