ut at me, for my burlesques were, of course, written in
rhyme. So I dropped the matter.

After a time he took it into his head to reopen the question of his
getting 300 pounds a year for doing, as he said, absolutely nothing, and
said he would try to find some employment which should bring him in
enough to live upon.

I laughed at this but let him alone. He tried and tried very hard for a
long while, but I need hardly say was unsuccessful. The older I grow,
the more convinced I become of the folly and credulity of the public; but
at the same time the harder do I see it is to impose oneself upon that
folly and credulity.

He tried editor after editor with article after article. Sometimes an
editor listened to him and told him to leave his articles; he almost
invariably, however, had them returned to him in the end with a polite
note saying that they were not suited for the particular paper to which
he had sent them. And yet many of these very articles appeared in his
later works, and no one complained of them, not at least on the score of
bad literary workmanship. "I see," he said to me one day, "that demand
is very imperious, and supply must be very suppliant."

Once, indeed, the editor of an important monthly magazine accepted an
article from him, and he thought he had now got a footing in the literary
world. The article was to appear in the next issue but one, and he was
to receive proof from the printers in about ten days or a fortnight; but
week after week passed and there was no proof; month after month went by
and there was still no room for Ernest's article; at length after about
six months the editor one morning told him that he had filled every
number of his review for the next ten months, but that his article should
definitely appear. On this he insisted on having his MS. returned to
him.

Sometimes his articles were actually published, and he found the editor
had edited them according to his own fancy, putting in jokes which he
thought were funny, or cutting out the very passage which Ernest had
considered the point of the whole thing, and then, though the articles
appeared, when it came to paying for them it was another matter, and he
never saw his money. "Editors," he said to me one day about this time,
"are like the people who bought and sold in the book of Revelation; there
is not one but has the mark of the beast upon him."

At last after months of disappointment and many a tedious hour wa