r parlor's grandeur of respectability.

"Hope you don't mind my coming?" Brissenden began.

"No, no, not at all," Martin answered, shaking hands and waving him to
the solitary chair, himself taking to the bed. "But how did you know
where I lived?"

"Called up the Morses. Miss Morse answered the 'phone. And here I am."
He tugged at his coat pocket and flung a thin volume on the table.
"There's a book, by a poet. Read it and keep it." And then, in reply to
Martin's protest: "What have I to do with books? I had another
hemorrhage this morning. Got any whiskey? No, of course not. Wait a
minute."

He was off and away. Martin watched his long figure go down the outside
steps, and, on turning to close the gate, noted with a pang the
shoulders, which had once been broad, drawn in now over, the collapsed
ruin of the chest. Martin got two tumblers, and fell to reading the book
of verse, Henry Vaughn Marlow's latest collection.

"No Scotch," Brissenden announced on his return. "The beggar sells
nothing but American whiskey. But here's a quart of it."

"I'll send one of the youngsters for lemons, and we'll make a toddy,"
Martin offered.

"I wonder what a book like that will earn Marlow?" he went on, holding up
the volume in question.

"Possibly fifty dollars," came the answer. "Though he's lucky if he
pulls even on it, or if he can inveigle a publisher to risk bringing it
out."

"Then one can't make a living out of poetry?"

Martin's tone and face alike showed his dejection.

"Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes. There's
Bruce, and Virginia Spring, and Sedgwick. They do very nicely. But
poetry--do you know how Vaughn Marlow makes his living?--teaching in a
boys' cramming-joint down in Pennsylvania, and of all private little
hells such a billet is the limit. I wouldn't trade places with him if he
had fifty years of life before him. And yet his work stands out from the
ruck of the contemporary versifiers as a balas ruby among carrots. And
the reviews he gets! Damn them, all of them, the crass manikins!"

"Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do
write," Martin concurred. "Why, I was appalled at the quantities of
rubbish written about Stevenson and his work."

"Ghouls and harpies!" Brissenden snapped out with clicking teeth. "Yes,
I know the spawn--complacently pecking at him for his Father Damien
letter, analyzing him, weighing him--"

"Measuri