I
hardly know."

"Is its value inestimable?" inquired the clerk. "Why, in a way I guess
you might say it is," said my parent.

Finally, against the clerk's mounting impatience, an estimate was
effected, and I was declared to be worth $500. I was cast carelessly
on to a pile of other packages of various shapes and sizes, and my
parent, giving me a farewell lingering look of love, went out the door.

Of my journey there is not much to say. I arrived in New York amid a
prodigious crush of packages, and was delivered, in company with about
a dozen others, which I knew to be brother or rival, manuscripts, at
the office of a great publishing house. Here I was signed for, and, in
the course of the day, unwrapped. I was ticketed with a number and my
title, and placed in a tall cabinet, where I remained in the society of
several shelves full of other manuscripts for a number of days. Here I
was delighted to find quite a coterie of fellow-Hoosiers. But a
remarkable proportion of my associates, I discovered, was from the
South. The majority of us hailed from small towns. In our company
were three or four of somewhat distinguished lineage.

As time passed and nothing happened, I grew somewhat nervous, as I knew
with what anxiety my dear parent in Indiana would be counting the days.
One of my new-found friends, a portly manuscript (a story of
sponge-fishers) that had been out of the cabinet and had had a reading
before my arrival, told me in the way of gossip something of the
situation at the moment in this house. My friend was an old
campaigner, very ragged and battered in appearance, and had been (I was
appalled to hear) submitted to seventeen publishing houses before
arriving here. It had lost all hope of any justice in the publishing
world, and was very cynical. Heavens! would I------

However, it appeared that at this house the first reader had just been
obliged to take a vacation owing to ill-health occasioned by too
assiduous application to her task of attempting to keep somewhere
abreast of the incoming flood of manuscripts. She was, it seems, a
large elderly lady who had tried out her own talents as a novelist
without marked success some twenty years ago. Her niece, a miss of
twenty or so, who had a fancy for an editorial career and who had
vainly been seeking a situation of this character for some time, found
a windfall in the instant need for a substitute first reader. It was
with some petulance, it s