faint accession of
interest.

"No," said the editor, smiling. Then he related the incidents of the
previous interview, with a certain humorous exaggeration which was part
of his nature. But Jack did not smile.

"You ought to have booted him out of the ranch on sight," he said. "What
right had he to come here prying into a lady's affairs?--at least a lady
as far as HE knows. Of course she's some old blowzy with frumpled hair
trying to rope in a greenhorn with a string of words and phrases,"
concluded Jack, carelessly, who had an equally cynical distrust of the
sex and of literature.

"That's about what I told him," said the editor.

"That's just what you SHOULDN'T have told him," returned Jack. "You
ought to have stuck up for that woman as if she'd been your own mother.
Lord! you fellows don't know how to run a magazine. You ought to let ME
sit on that chair and tackle your customers."

"What would you have done, Jack?" asked the editor, much amused to
find that his hitherto invincible hero was not above the ordinary human
weakness of offering advice as to editorial conduct.

"Done?" reflected Jack. "Well, first, sonny, I shouldn't keep a revolver
in a drawer that I had to OPEN to get at."

"But what would you have said?"

"I should simply have asked him what was the price of lumber at
Mendocino," said Jack, sweetly, "and when he told me, I should have said
that the samples he was offering out of his own head wouldn't suit. You
see, you don't want any trifling in such matters. You write well enough,
my boy," continued he, turning over his paper, "but what you're lacking
in is editorial dignity. But go on with your work. Don't mind me."

Thus admonished, the editor again bent over his desk, and his friend
softly took up his suspended song. The editor had not proceeded far in
his corrections when Jack's voice again broke the silence.

"Where are those d----d verses, anyway?"

Without looking up, the editor waved his pencil towards an uncut copy of
the "Excelsior Magazine" lying on the table.

"You don't suppose I'm going to READ them, do you?" said Jack,
aggrievedly. "Why don't you say what they're about? That's your business
as editor."

But that functionary, now wholly lost and wandering in the non-sequitur
of an involved passage in the proof before him, only waved an impatient
remonstrance with his pencil and knit his brows. Jack, with a sigh, took
up the magazine.

A long silence followed, broken only