the last the syndicate had been paying him five dollars each for them and accepting every one he sent.  So he had looked upon the ten as good as sold, and he had lived accordingly, on a basis of fifty dollars in the bank.  So it was that he entered abruptly upon a lean period, wherein he continued selling his earlier efforts to publications that would not pay and submitting his later work to magazines that would not buy.  Also, he resumed his trips to the pawn-broker down in Oakland.  A few jokes and snatches of humorous verse, sold to the New York weeklies, made existence barely possible for him.  It was at this time that he wrote letters of inquiry to the several great monthly and quarterly reviews, and learned in reply that they rarely considered unsolicited articles, and that most of their contents were written upon order by well-known specialists who were authorities in their various fields.

CHAPTER XXIX

It was a hard summer for Martin.  Manuscript readers and editors were away on vacation, and publications that ordinarily returned a decision in three weeks now retained his manuscript for three months or more.  The consolation he drew from it was that a saving in postage was effected by the deadlock.  Only the robber-publications seemed to remain actively in business, and to them Martin disposed of all his early efforts, such as “Pearl-diving,” “The Sea as a Career,” “Turtle-catching,” and “The Northeast Trades.”  For these manuscripts he never received a penny.  It is true, after six months’ correspondence, he effected a compromise, whereby he received a safety razor for “Turtle-catching,” and that The Acropolis, having agreed to give him five dollars cash and five yearly subscriptions:  for “The Northeast Trades,” fulfilled the second part of the agreement.

For a sonnet on Stevenson he managed to wring two dollars out of a Boston editor who was running a magazine with a Matthew Arnold taste and a penny-dreadful purse.  “The Peri and the Pearl,” a clever skit of a poem of two hundred lines, just finished, white hot from his brain, won the heart of the editor of a San Francisco magazine published in the interest of a great railroad.  When the editor wrote, offering him payment in transportation, Martin wrote back to inquire if the transportation was transferable.  It was not, and so, being prevented from peddling it, he asked for the return of the poem.  Back it came, with the editor’s regrets, and Martin sent it to San Francisco again, this time to The Hornet, a pretentious monthly that had been fanned into a constellation of the first magnitude by the brilliant journalist who founded it.  But The Hornet’s light had begun to dim long before Martin was born.  The editor promised Martin fifteen dollars for the poem, but, when it was published, seemed to forget about it.  Several of his letters being ignored, Martin indicted an angry one which drew a reply.  It was written by a new editor, who coolly informed Martin that he declined to be held responsible for the old editor’s mistakes, and that he did not think much of “The Peri and the Pearl” anyway.