d soon for penalty of their rashness and folly
they forget their own land of the solitary, and its speech
perishes from their lips. The traveller's tales are of all the
most precious, because he comes from a land--the poet's
solitude--which no other feet have trodden and which no other
feet will tread.

So, briefly and awkwardly, he justifies himself, being given (as
Mrs. Quickly apologized) to "allicholy and musing." Oh, it is not
easy! As Gilbert Chesterton said, in a noble poem:

The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.

[Illustration]

1100 WORDS

The managing editor, the city editor, the production manager, the
foreman of the composing room, and the leading editorial writer
having all said to us with a great deal of sternness, "Your copy for
Saturday has got to be upstairs by such and such a time, because we
are going to make up the page at so and so A.M.," we got rather
nervous.

If we may say so, we did not like the way they said it. They
spoke--and we are thinking particularly of the production
manager--with a kind of paternal severity that was deeply
distressing to our spirit. They are all, in off hours, men of
delightfully easy disposition. They are men with whom it would be a
pleasure and a privilege to be cast away on a desert island or in a
crowded subway train. It is only just to say that they are men whom
we admire greatly. When we meet them in the elevator, or see them at
Frank's having lunch, how full of jolly intercourse they are. But in
the conduct of their passionate and perilous business, that is, of
getting the paper out on time, a holy anguish shines upon their
brows. The stern daughter of the voice of God has whispered to them,
and they pass on the whisper to us through a mega-phone.

That means to say that within the hour we have got to show up
something in the neighbourhood of 1100 words to these magistrates
and overseers. With these keys--typewriter keys, of course--we have
got to unlock our heart. Milton, thou shouldst be living at this
hour. Speaking of Milton, the damp that fell round his path (in
Wordsworth's sonnet) was nothing to the damp that fell round our
alert vestiges as we hastened to the Salamis station in that drench
this morning. (We ask you to observe our self-restraint. We might
have said "drenching downpour of silver Long Island rain," or
something of that sort, and thus got several words ne