o on, endlessly. It was very fetching to
make the girl propose in the course of being reunited, and Martin
discovered, bit by bit, other decidedly piquant and fetching ruses. But
marriage bells at the end was the one thing he could take no liberties
with; though the heavens rolled up as a scroll and the stars fell, the
wedding bells must go on ringing just the same. In quantity, the formula
prescribed twelve hundred words minimum dose, fifteen hundred words
maximum dose.

Before he got very far along in the art of the storiette, Martin worked
out half a dozen stock forms, which he always consulted when constructing
storiettes. These forms were like the cunning tables used by
mathematicians, which may be entered from top, bottom, right, and left,
which entrances consist of scores of lines and dozens of columns, and
from which may be drawn, without reasoning or thinking, thousands of
different conclusions, all unchallengably precise and true. Thus, in the
course of half an hour with his forms, Martin could frame up a dozen or
so storiettes, which he put aside and filled in at his convenience. He
found that he could fill one in, after a day of serious work, in the hour
before going to bed. As he later confessed to Ruth, he could almost do
it in his sleep. The real work was in constructing the frames, and that
was merely mechanical.

He had no doubt whatever of the efficacy of his formula, and for once he
knew the editorial mind when he said positively to himself that the first
two he sent off would bring checks. And checks they brought, for four
dollars each, at the end of twelve days.

In the meantime he was making fresh and alarming discoveries concerning
the magazines. Though the Transcontinental had published "The Ring of
Bells," no check was forthcoming. Martin needed it, and he wrote for it.
An evasive answer and a request for more of his work was all he received.
He had gone hungry two days waiting for the reply, and it was then that
he put his wheel back in pawn. He wrote regularly, twice a week, to the
Transcontinental for his five dollars, though it was only
semi-occasionally that he elicited a reply. He did not know that the
Transcontinental had been staggering along precariously for years, that
it was a fourth-rater, or tenth-rater, without standing, with a crazy
circulation that partly rested on petty bullying and partly on patriotic
appealing, and with advertisements that were scarcely more tha