“Mr. Stack, I don’t think I can accept this story.  In some respects it is really wonderful; but I am afraid that if I published it, it would attract almost too much attention.  People would get too wild over it.  We have to be careful.  For instance, here in the first chapter you mention the death of Mrs. McGinnis, the hero’s mother.  She dies; you inter Mrs. McGinnis in the cemetery; you give an affecting scene at the funeral; you run up a monument over her and plant honeysuckle upon her grave.  You create in the reader’s mind a strong impression that Mrs. McGinnis is thoroughly dead.  And yet, over here in the twenty-second chapter, you make a man named Thompson fall in love with her, and she is married to him, and she goes skipping around through the rest of the story as lively as a grasshopper, and you all the time alluding to Thompson as her second husband.  You see that kind of thing won’t do.  It excites remark.  Readers complain about it.”

“You don’t say I did that?  Well, now, do you know I was thinking all the time that it was Mr. McGinnis that I buried in the first chapter?  I must have got them mixed up somehow.”

“And then,” continued the major, “when you introduce the hero, you mention that he has but one arm, having lost the other in battle.  But in chapter twelve you run him through a saw-mill by an accident, and you mention that he lost an arm there, too.  And yet in the nineteenth chapter you say, ’Adolph rushed up to Mary, threw his arms about her, and clasped her to his bosom;’ and then you go on to relate how he sat down at the piano in the soft moonlight and played one of Beethoven’s sonatas ‘with sweet poetic fervor.’  Now, the thing, you see, don’t dovetail.  Adolph couldn’t possibly throw his arms around Mary if one was buried in the field of battle and the other was minced up in a saw-mill, and he couldn’t clasp her to his bosom unless he threw a lasso with his teeth and hauled her in by swallowing the slack of the rope.  As for the piano—­well, you know as well as I do that an armless man can’t play a Beethoven sonata unless he knows how to perform on the instrument with his nose, and in that case you insult the popular intelligence when you talk about ‘sweet poetic fervor.’  I have my fingers on the public pulse, and I know they won’t stand it.”

“Well, well,” said Stack, “I don’t know how I ever came to—­”

“Let me direct your attention to another incendiary matter,” interrupted the major.  “In the first love-scene between Adolph and—­and—­let me see—­what’s her name?—­Mary—­you say that ’her liquid blue eye rested softly upon him as he poured forth the story of his love, and its azure was dimmed by a flood of happy tears.’  Well, sir, about twenty pages farther on, where the villain insults her, you observe that her black eyes flashed lightning at him and seemed to scorch him where he stood.  Now, let me direct attention to the fact that if the girl’s eyes were blue they