couldn’t be black; and if you mean to convey the impression that she had one blue eye and one black eye, and that she only looked softly at Adolph out of the off eye, while the near eye roamed around, not doing anything in particular, why, she is too phenomenal for a novel, and only suitable for a place in the menagerie by the side of the curiosities.  And then you say that although her eye was liquid yet it scorched the villain.  People won’t put up with that kind of thing.  It makes them delirious and murderous.”

“Too bad!” said Stack.  “I forgot what I’d said about her eyes when I wrote that scene with the villain.”

“And here, in the twentieth chapter, you say that Magruder was stabbed with a bowie-knife in the hands of the Spaniard, and in the next chapter you give an account of the post-mortem examination, and make the doctors hunt for the bullet and find it embedded in his liver.  Even patient readers can’t remain calm under such circumstances.  They lose control of themselves.”

“It’s unfortunate,” said Stack.

“Now, the way you manage the Browns in the story is also exasperating.  First you represent Mrs. Brown as taking her twins around to church to be christened.  In the middle of the book you make Mrs. Brown lament that she never had any children, and you wind up the story by bringing in Mrs. Brown with her grandson in her arms just after having caused Mr. Brown to state to the clergyman that the only child he ever had died in his fourth year.  Just think of the effect of such a thing on the public mind!  Why, this story would fill all the insane asylums in the country.”

“Those Browns don’t seem to be very definite, somehow,” said Stack, thoughtfully.

“Worst of all,” said major, “in chapter thirty-one you make the lovers resolve upon suicide, and you put them in a boat and drift them over Niagara Falls.  Twelve chapters farther on you suddenly introduce them walking in the twilight in a leafy lane, and although afterward she goes into a nunnery and takes the black veil because he has been killed by pirates in the Spanish West Indies, in the next chapter to the last you have a scene where she goes to a surprise-party at the Presbyterian minister’s and finds him there making arrangements for the wedding as if nothing had ever happened; and then, after you disclose the fact that she was a boy in disguise, and not a woman at all, you marry them to each other, and represent the boy heroine as giving her blessing to her daughter.  Oh, it’s awful—­awful!  It won’t do.  It really won’t.  You’d better go into some other kind of business, Mr. Stack.”

Then Stack took his manuscript and went home to fix it up so as to make the story run together better.  The Patriot will not publish it even if Stack reconstructs it.

* * * * *