had spoken to
several of the fellows about the theme of his poem, until the notion
that Baxter was at work upon something fine had become pretty well
disseminated throughout our membership. He would occasionally read
brief passages to a small coterie of friends in the sitting-room or
library,--never more than ten lines at once, or to more than five people
at a time,--and these excerpts gave at least a few of us a pretty fair
idea of the motive and scope of the poem. As I, for one, gathered,
it was quite along the line of Baxter's philosophy. Society was the
Procrustes which, like the Greek bandit of old, caught every man born
into the world, and endeavored to fit him to some preconceived standard,
generally to the one for which he was least adapted. The world was full
of men and women who were merely square pegs in round holes, and vice
versa. Most marriages were unhappy because the contracting parties were
not properly mated. Religion was mostly superstition, science for the
most part sciolism, popular education merely a means of forcing the
stupid and repressing the bright, so that all the youth of the rising
generation might conform to the same dull, dead level of democratic
mediocrity. Life would soon become so monotonously uniform and so
uniformly monotonous as to be scarce worth the living.

It was Smith, I think, who first proposed that the club publish Baxter's
Procrustes. The poet himself did not seem enthusiastic when the subject
was broached; he demurred for some little time, protesting that the poem
was not worthy of publication. But when it was proposed that the edition
be limited to fifty copies he agreed to consider the proposition. When
I suggested, having in mind my secret theory of Baxter's failure in
authorship, that the edition would at least be in the hands of friends,
that it would be difficult for a hostile critic to secure a copy, and
that if it should not achieve success from a literary point of view,
the extent of the failure would be limited to the size of the edition,
Baxter was visibly impressed. When the literary committee at length
decided to request formally of Baxter the privilege of publishing his
Procrustes, he consented, with evident reluctance, upon condition that
he should supervise the printing, binding, and delivery of the books,
merely submitting to the committee, in advance, the manuscript, and
taking their views in regard to the bookmaking.

The manuscript was duly presented t