scover in the accompanying
manuscript, about to start for Treasure Island, where, if anywhere
in this earth, ready money is to be found on easy terms of personal
insecurity.'_

'Oh, confound it,' I cried, 'here's another fiend of a woman sending me
another manuscript! They are always at it! Wants to get it into a
high-class magazine, as usual.' And my guess was correct.

The letter went on:--

'_You, who are so well known, will have no difficulty in getting
the editor of the Nineteenth Century, or the Quarterly Review, or
Bow Bells, to accept my little contribution. I shall be glad to hear
what remuneration I am to expect, and cheques may be forwarded
to_

'_Yours very truly,_

'MARY MARTIN.

'P.S.--_The mummy case is very valuable. Please deposit it at the
Old Bank, in the High, where it will represent my balance._

'M. M.'

Now I get letters like this (not usually escorted by a mummy case)
about thrice a day, and a pretty sum it costs me in stamps to send back
the rubbish to the amateur authors. But how could I send back a
manuscript to a lady already on her way to Treasure Island?

Here, perhaps, I should explain how Mary Martin, as she signed herself,
came to choose _me_ for her literary agent. To be sure, total strangers
are always sending me their manuscripts, but Mrs. Martin had actually
been introduced to me years before.

I was staying, as it happened, at one of our university towns, which I
shall call Oxford, for short--not that that was _really_ its name.
Walking one day with a niece, a scholar of Lady Betty's Hall, we
chanced to meet in the High two rather remarkable persons. One of them
was the very prettiest girl I ever saw in my life. Her noble frame
marked her as the victor over Girton at lawn-tennis; while her
_pince-nez_ indicated the student. She reminded me, in the grace of her
movements, of the Artemis of the Louvre and the Psyche of Naples, while
her thoughtful expression recalled the celebrated 'Reading Girl' of
Donatello. Only a reading girl, indeed, could have been, as she was,
Reader in English Literature on the Churton Collins Foundation.

'Who is she?' I said to my friend, the scholar of Lady Betty's; 'what a
lovely creature she is!'

'Who, _that_?' she replied with some tartness. 'Well, what you can see
in _her_, _I_ don't know. That's Leonora O'Dolite, and the lady with
her is the Lady Superior of Lady Betty's.

'They cal