e hours a day is enough for mental labor. Couldn't
you take me and the children to the woods this afternoon?"

"I am a little tired," I admitted. So we went to the woods.

But I soon got the swing of it. Within a month I was turning out copy
as regular as shipments of hardware.

And I had success. My column in the weekly made some stir, and I was
referred to in a gossipy way by the critics as something fresh in the
line of humorists. I augmented my income considerably by contributing
to other publications.

I picked up the tricks of the trade. I could take a funny idea and
make a two-line joke of it, earning a dollar. With false whiskers on,
it would serve up cold as a quatrain, doubling its producing value. By
turning the skirt and adding a ruffle of rhyme you would hardly
recognize it as _vers de societe_ with neatly shod feet and a
fashion-plate illustration.

I began to save up money, and we had new carpets, and a parlor organ.
My townspeople began to look upon me as a citizen of some consequence
instead of the merry trifler I had been when I clerked in the hardware
store.

After five or six months the spontaniety seemed to depart from my
humor. Quips and droll sayings no longer fell carelessly from my lips.
I was sometimes hard run for material. I found myself listening to
catch available ideas from the conversation of my friends. Sometimes I
chewed my pencil and gazed at the wall paper for hours trying to build
up some gay little bubble of unstudied fun.

And then I became a harpy, a Moloch, a Jonah, a vampire, to my
acquaintances. Anxious, haggard, greedy, I stood among them like a
veritable killjoy. Let a bright saying, a witty comparison, a piquant
phrase fall from their lips and I was after it like a hound springing
upon a bone. I dared not trust my memory; but, turning aside guiltily
and meanly, I would make a note of it in my ever-present memorandum
book or upon my cuff for my own future use.

My friends regarded me in sorrow and wonder. I was not the same man.
Where once I had furnished them entertainment and jollity, I now preyed
upon them. No jests from me ever bid for their smiles now. They were
too precious. I could not afford to dispense gratuitously the means of
my livelihood.

I was a lugubrious fox praising the singing of my friends, the crow's,
that they might drop from their beaks the morsels of wit that I coveted.

Nearly every one began to avoid me. I even forgot how