he sees,--no more. So by degrees the man who serves as model
approaches. A bright pupil will learn to get the outline of a human
figure in ten lessons, the model coming five hundred feet nearer each
time. A dull one may require fifty, the model beginning a mile off, or
more, and coming a hundred feet nearer at each move."

The company were amused by all this, but could not help seeing that
there was a certain practical possibility about the scheme. Our two
Annexes, as we call then, appeared to be interested in the project, or
fancy, or whim, or whatever the older heads might consider it. "I guess
I'll try it," said the American Annex. "Quite so," answered the English
Annex. Why the first girl "guessed" about her own intentions it is hard
to say. What "quite so" referred to it would not be easy to determine.
But these two expressions would decide the nationality of our two young
ladies if we met them on the top of the great Pyramid.

I was very glad that Number Seven had interrupted me. In fact, it is
a good thing once in a while to break in upon the monotony of a steady
talker at a dinner-table, tea-table, or any other place of social
converse. The best talker is liable to become the most formidable of
bores. It is a peculiarity of the bore that he is the last person to
find himself out. Many a terebrant I have known who, in that capacity,
to borrow a line from Coleridge,

"Was great, nor knew how great he was."

A line, by the way, which, as I have remarked, has in it a germ like
that famous "He builded better than he knew" of Emerson.

There was a slight lull in the conversation. The Mistress, who keeps an
eye on the course of things, and feared that one of those panic silences
was impending, in which everybody wants to say something and does not
know just what to say, begged me to go on with my remarks about the
"manufacture" of "poetry."

You use the right term, madam, I said. The manufacture of that article
has become an extensive and therefore an important branch of industry.
One must be an editor, which I am not, or a literary confidant of a wide
circle of correspondents, which I am, to have any idea of the enormous
output of verse which is characteristic of our time. There are many
curious facts connected with this phenomenon. Educated people--yes,
and many who are not educated--have discovered that rhymes are not the
private property of a few noted writers who, having squatted on that
part of the li