ef had been laid over it. I raised the handkerchief. I know
not what the others were thinking, but the last time we met he had
told me something, it was not much--only that no woman had ever kissed
him. It seemed to me that, as I gazed, the wistfulness came back to
his face. I whispered to a woman who was present, and stooping over
him, she was about to--but her eyes were dry, and I stopped her. The
handkerchief was replaced, and all left the room save myself. Again I
raised the handkerchief. I cannot tell you how innocent he looked.'"

"Who was he?" asked Pym.

"Nobody," said Tommy, with some awe; "it just came to me. Do you
notice how simple the wording is? It took me some time to make it so
simple."

"You are just nineteen, I think?"

"Yes."

Pym looked at him wonderingly.

"Thomas," he said, "you are a very queer little devil."

He also said: "And it is possible you may find the treasure you are
always talking about. Don't jump to the ceiling, my friend, because I
say that. I was once after the treasure, myself; and you can see
whether I found it."

From about that time, on the chances that this mysterious treasure
might spring up in the form of a new kind of flower, Pym zealously
cultivated the ground, and Tommy had an industrious time of it. He was
taken off his stories, which at once regained their elasticity, and
put on to exercises.

"If you have nothing to say on the subject, say nothing," was one of
the new rules, which few would have expected from Pym. Another was:
"As soon as you can say what you think, and not what some other person
has thought for you, you are on the way to being a remarkable man."

"Without concentration, Thomas, you are lost; concentrate, though your
coat-tails be on fire.

"Try your hand at description, and when you have done chortling over
the result, reduce the whole by half without missing anything out.

"Analyze your characters and their motives at the prodigious length in
which you revel, and then, my sonny, cut your analysis out. It is for
your own guidance, not the reader's.

"'I have often noticed,' you are always saying. The story has nothing
to do with you. Obliterate yourself. I see that will be your stiffest
job.

"Stop preaching. It seems to me the pulpit is where you should look
for the treasure. Nineteen, and you are already as didactic as
seventy."

And so on. Over his exercises Tommy was now engrossed for so long a
period that, as he sits there, y