lt." And it was to this neat
application of the local climate that he owed, not only much of the sale
of Thirteen Star, but the whole business of his advertising agency.

The large desk (to resume our survey of the office) stood about the
middle, knee-deep in stacks of handbills and posters, of _Why Drink
French Brandy?_ and _The Advertiser's Vade-Mecum._ It was flanked upon
the one hand by two female type-writers, who rested not between
the hours of nine and four, and upon the other by a model of the
agricultural machine. The walls, where they were not broken by telephone
boxes and a couple of photographs--one representing the wreck of the
James L. Moody on a bold and broken coast, the other the Saturday tug
alive with amateur fishers--almost disappeared under oil-paintings
gaudily framed. Many of these were relics of the Latin Quarter, and I
must do Pinkerton the justice to say that none of them were bad,
and some had remarkable merit. They went off slowly but for handsome
figures; and their places were progressively supplied with the work of
local artists. These last it was one of my first duties to review and
criticise. Some of them were villainous, yet all were saleable. I said
so; and the next moment saw myself, the figure of a miserable renegade,
bearing arms in the wrong camp. I was to look at pictures thenceforward,
not with the eye of the artist, but the dealer; and I saw the stream
widen that divided me from all I loved.

"Now, Loudon," Pinkerton had said, the morning after the lecture, "now
Loudon, we can go at it shoulder to shoulder. This is what I have longed
for: I wanted two heads and four arms; and now I have 'em. You'll find
it's just the same as art--all observation and imagination; only more
movement. Just wait till you begin to feel the charm!"

I might have waited long. Perhaps I lack a sense; for our whole
existence seemed to me one dreary bustle, and the place we bustled in
fitly to be called the Place of Yawning. I slept in a little den behind
the office; Pinkerton, in the office itself, stretched on a patent sofa
which sometimes collapsed, his slumbers still further menaced by an
imminent clock with an alarm. Roused by this diabolical contrivance, we
rose early, went forth early to breakfast, and returned by nine to what
Pinkerton called work, and I distraction. Masses of letters must be
opened, read, and answered; some by me at a subsidiary desk which had
been introduced on the morning of m