fiend goes off hurt in his mind. He doesn't know what I mean any more
than I do, but it shuts him up completely, which is just so much
gained."

"I must confess," said the Poet, "that I cannot myself see where there
is any money for your Rhyme Clearing-house. Ordinarily I quite approve
of your schemes, but in this instance I go over to the enemy."

"I don't say that it is a gold-mine," said the Idiot. "I doubt if I had
every cent that is paid for poetry in a year by everybody to everybody
that my income would reach one hundredth part of what I'd receive as a
successful manufacturer of soap; but there would be more money in poetry
than there is if by some pooling of our issues we could corner the
market. Suppose every writer of a quatrain in America should send his
whole product to us. We could say to the magazines, 'Gentlemen,
quatrains are not quatraining as hard as they were. If you need a
four-line bit of gloom and rhyme to finish off your thirty-second page,
our price is twenty-five dollars instead of seventy-five cents, as of
yore.' So with all other kinds of verse. We'd simply name our figure,
force the editors to accept it, and unload. We might get caught on the
last thirty or forty thousand, but our profits on the others would
enable us to more than meet the losses."

"And would you pay the author the twenty-five dollars?" asked Mr.
Whitechoker.

"Not if we were sane," replied the Idiot. "We'd pay the author two
dollars and fifty cents, which is one dollar and seventy-five cents more
than he gets now. _He_ couldn't complain."

"And those that you couldn't sell?" asked the Bibliomaniac.

"We'd simply mark 'Not Good' and return to the author. That's what
happens to him now, so no objection could be raised to that. But there's
still another side to this matter," said the Idiot. "Publishers would
be quite as anxious to help it along as the poets. Dealing through us,
they would be spared the necessity of interviewing poets, which I am
informed is always painful because of the necessity which publishers
labor under to give the poet to understand that they are in the business
for profit, not for pleasure or mere love of sinking money in a
magazine. So the publishers would keep a standing account of hard cash
in our bank. Say a magazine used one hundred dollars' worth of verse in
a month. The publisher at the beginning of the year would deposit twelve
hundred dollars with us, and throughout the year would draw o