ou do not take it as the
correct thing, and enjoy it too, you might as well have stayed away from
the muster altogether.

FREDERIC G. MATHER.

THE STORY OF A STORY.

I.

THE HEROINE.

A horse-car, for all it is so common a sight, is not without its
picturesque side. To stand on a long bridge at night, while the lights
twinkle in the perspective, and watch one of these animated servants,
with its colored globular eye, come scrambling toward you, is to see a
clumsy, good-natured Caliban of this mechanical age. One of these days,
when the horse-car is superseded by some electric skipping wicker-basket
or what not, the Austin Dobson of the time will doubtless expend his
light sympathy of verse on the pathetic old abandoned conveyance.

Such picturesqueness, however, is rather for one who seeks, than a view
which thrusts itself upon the merely casual observer. At any rate,
another Austin,--Austin Buckingham,--who was engaged one winter evening
at the end of a long bridge in idealizing horse-cars, hit upon this way
of looking at the one he was waiting for, out of sheer desperation of
intellect. He was a young _litterateur_ who was out of work. He was not,
like other workmen in similar straits, going from one shop to another
looking for a job. Not at all. He recognized the situation. He had only
to write a clever story and he could quickly dispose of it. He had
written a good many stories in his short day. Now he wished to write
another. The pity of it was that he had no story to tell,--absolutely
nothing. He had been through his note-books, but they gave him no help;
he had kept his ears open for some suggestive little incident, but the
whole world seemed suddenly given over to the dreariest commonplace. He
had walked out this evening, slowly revolving in his mind the various
odds and ends which came upon demand of his rag-picking memory, and yet
nothing of value had turned up. He was tired, and determined to take a
horse-car for the rest of the way.

It was while he stood watching for the one which took him nearest to his
door, that he made the slight reflection with which this story opens.
"Could I make a horse-car the hero of my story?" he asked himself, with
a petulant tone, as he thought how dismally dull he was. The jingling
car came up, and he jumped upon the rear platform, wedged his way
through the men and boys who crowded the steps and platform, and so
pushed into the interior. He found half a d