ecided to introduce no more; with all the confidence that whisky
inspires and all the easy complacency it gives to its servant, he then
launched himself lovingly into his work: he married the coachman to the
society-young-lady for the sake of the scandal; married the Duke to the
blonde's stepmother, for the sake of the sensation; stopped the
desperado's salary; created a misunderstanding between the devil and the
Roscicrucian; threw the Duke's property into the wicked lawyer's hands;
made the lawyer's upbraiding conscience drive him to drink, thence to
delirium tremens, thence to suicide; broke the coachman's neck; let his
widow succumb to contumely, neglect, poverty and consumption; caused the
blonde to drown herself, leaving her clothes on the bank with the
customary note pinned to them forgiving the Duke and hoping he would be
happy; revealed to the Duke, by means of the usual strawberry mark on
left arm, that he had married his own long-lost mother and destroyed his
long-lost sister; instituted the proper and necessary suicide of the Duke
and the Duchess in order to compass poetical justice; opened the earth
and let the Roscicrucian through, accompanied with the accustomed smoke
and thunder and smell of brimstone, and finished with the promise that in
the next chapter, after holding a general inquest, he would take up the
surviving character of the novel and tell what became of the devil!
It read with singular smoothness, and with a "dead" earnestness that was
funny enough to suffocate a body. But there was war when it came in.
The other novelists were furious. The mild stranger, not yet more than
half sober, stood there, under a scathing fire of vituperation, meek and
bewildered, looking from one to another of his assailants, and wondering
what he could have done to invoke such a storm. When a lull came at
last, he said his say gently and appealingly--said he did not rightly
remember what he had written, but was sure he had tried to do the best he
could, and knew his object had been to make the novel not only pleasant
and plausible but instructive and----

The bombardment began again. The novelists assailed his ill-chosen
adjectives and demolished them with a storm of denunciation and ridicule.
And so the siege went on. Every time the stranger tried to appease the
enemy he only made matters worse. Finally he offered to rewrite the
chapter. This arrested hostilities. The indignation gradually quieted
down, pe