inative about your work. You could give a warranty deed for
every fact which you put on the market. I was so pleased with your
method that I bought a job lot of your books, so that I could see for
myself how you conducted your business. Will you allow me, as one in the
same line, to indulge in a little criticism? I am afraid that you are
making the same mistake I made when I first went into real estate. I was
so possessed with the idea of the value of land that I became "land
poor." It strikes me that a novelist may become reality poor in the same
way; that is, by investing in a great many realities that are not worth
what he pays for them.

You see, there is a fact which we do not mention in our circulars. There
is a great deal of land lying out of doors. _Some_ land is in great
demand, and the real trick is to find out what that land is. You can't
go out on the plains of Wyoming and give an acre of land the same value
which an acre has in the Wall Street district. I speak from experience,
having tried to convince the public that if the acres are real, the
values I suggested must be real also. People wouldn't believe me, and I
lost money.

And the same thing is true about improvements. They must be related to
the market value of the land on which they are placed. A forty-story
building at Goshenville Corners would be a mistake. There is no call for
it.

This is the mistake which I fear you have been making. Your novel is a
carefully prepared structure, and must have cost a great deal, but it is
built on ground which is not worth enough to justify the investment. It
has not what we call "site value." You yourself declare that you have no
particular interest in the characters you describe at such length. All
that you have to say for them is that they are real. It is as if I were
to put up an expensive apartment-house on a vacant lot I have at North
Ovid. North Ovid is real, and so would be the apartment-house; but what
of it?

There are ninety millions of people in this country, all with characters
which might be carefully studied, if we had time. But we haven't the
time. So we have to choose our intimates. We prefer to know those who
seem to us most worth knowing. You should remember that the novelist has
no monopoly on realism. The newspapers are full of all sorts of
realities. The historian is a keen competitor.

Do you know that when I went to the bookstore to get your works I fell
in with a book on Garibaldi b