m answered.

"Why, I've told you that story," retorted the Bellows. "Jimmie ate the red
apple and died. What more do you want? That's all there is to it."

"It isn't a very long story," suggested Tom, ruefully, for he was much
disappointed.

"Well, why should it be?" demanded the Bellows. "A story doesn't have to
be long to be good, and as long as it is all there--"

"I know," said Tom; "but in most stories there's a lot of things put in
that help to make it interesting."

"All padding!" sneered the Bellows, "and that I will never do. If a story
can be told in five words what's the use of padding it out to five
thousand?"

"None," said Tom, "except that you can't make a book out of a story of
five words."

"Oh, yes, you can," said the Bellows, airily. "It isn't any trouble at all
if you only know how, and in the end you have a much more useful book than
if you made it a million words long. You can print the five words on the
first page and leave the other five hundred pages blank, so that after you
get through with the volume as a story book you can use it for a blank
book or a diary. Most books nowadays are so full of story that when you
get through with them there isn't anything else you can do with the book."

"It's a new idea," said Tom, with a laugh.

"And all my own invention, too," said the Bellows proudly.

"He's the most inventive Bellows that ever was," put in the Poker, "that
is, in a literary way. How many copies of your book of 'Unwritten Poems'
did you sell, Wheezy?" he added.

"Eight million," returned the Bellows. "That was probably my greatest
literary achievement."

"'Unwritten Poems,' eh?" said Tom, to whom the title seemed curious.

"Yes," said the Bellows. "The book had three hundred pages, all nicely
bound--twenty-six lines to a page--and each beginning with a capital
letter, just as poetry should. Then, so as to be quite fair to all the
letters, I began with A and went right straight through the alphabet to
Z."

"But the poems?" demanded Tom.

"They were unwritten just as the title said," returned the Bellows. "You
see that left everything to the imagination, which is a great thing in
poetry."

"Didn't people complain?" Tom asked.

"Everybody did," replied the Bellows, "but that was just what I wanted. I
agreed to answer every complaint accompanied by ten cents in postage
stamps. Eight million complaints alone brought me in $480,000 over and
above all expenses, which were fou