e! You must see Worthington Oakes about this, Abe."

"I certainly will," he vowed.

VI

He certainly did, as Mr. Worthington Oakes, the publisher of the
_Bee_, will testify. In the front office on the editorial floor he saw
Mr. Oakes for a bad half-hour, and demanded a public retraction of the
insult.

At about the same time a dapper stranger who had come up in the
elevator with Mr. Wilbram held speech with Assistant City-Editor Sloan
in the local room at the other end of the hall.

"Yonder's your bird," said Mr. Sloan, pointing to a poetic-looking
young man at a desk in a corner.

Crossing to the poet, who was absorbed in his day' poesy and talking
to himself as he versified, the stranger smiled and spoke.

"Am I addressing the celebrated D.K.T.?"

"Am, cam, dam, damn, ham, jam, lamb----"

The far-away look of genius faded out of the poet's eyes.

"Not buying," said he. "My pay-envelope is mortgaged to you
book-agents for ten years to come. Ma'am, ram, Sam, cram, clam, gram,
slam----"

"Books are not my line," said the dapper one briskly. "I represent the
Jones-Nonpareil Newspaper Syndicate. In fact, I am Jones. I have a
proposition to make to you, Mr. D.K.T., that may enable you to buy
more books than you can ever read. You know, of course, what the
Jones-Nonpareil service is. We reach the leading dailies of the United
States and Canada----"

"Have a chair, Mr. Jones."

"Thank you. We handle some very successful writers. Malcomb Hardy, you
may have heard, takes his little five hundred a week out of us; and
poor Larry Bonner pulled down eleven hundred as long as he had health.
His Chinese-laundryman sketches might be selling yet."

"Suspense is cruel," spoke D.K.T. eagerly. "Let the glad news come."

"Some time ago," said the syndicate man, "you printed in your column
an essay in imitation of a schoolboy's. You called it 'Moral
Principles'."

D.K.T. sank back with a low moan.

"If you can write six of those a week for a year," continued the
visitor, "you won't ever need to slave any more. You can burn your pen
and devote the rest of your life to golf and good works."

The poet closed his eyes. "Sham, swam, diagram," he murmured.

"Does a minimum guarantee of fifteen thousand a year look like
anything to you? There will, of course, be the book rights and the
movie rights in addition."

"Anagram, epigram, telegram, flimflam--aha!" cried D.K.T. "Siam!" He
wrote it down.

"That little skit of