t 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, peace reigned again and the sufferer retired in safety and got him
to his own citadel.

But on the way thither the evil angel tempted him and he got drunk again.
And again his imagination went mad. He led the heroes and heroines a
wilder dance than ever; and yet all through it ran that same convincing
air of honesty and earnestness that had marked his first work. He got
the characters into the most extraordinary situations, put them through
the most surprising performances, and made them talk the strangest talk!
But the chapter cannot be described. It was symmetrically crazy; it was
artistically absurd; and it had explanatory footnotes that were fully as
curious as the text. I remember one of the "situations," and will offer
it as an example of the whole. He altered the character of the brilliant
lawyer, and made him a great-hearted, splendid fellow; gave him fame and
riches, and set his age at thirty-three years. Then he made the blonde
discover, through the help of the Roscicrucian and the melodramatic
miscreant, that while the Duke loved her money ardently and wanted it, he
secretly felt a sort of leaning toward the society-young-lady. Stung to
the quick, she tore her affections from him and bestowed them with
tenfold power upon the lawyer, who responded with consuming zeal. But
the parents would none of it. What they wanted in the family was a Duke;
and a Duke they were determined to have; though they confessed that next
to the Duke the lawyer had their preference. Necessarily the blonde now
went into a decline. The parents were alarmed. They pleaded with her to
marry the