One day shortly after this I was packed up with great care and very carefully addressed, and under my parent’s arm I boarded an interurban car.  We new over the friendly-looking Hoosier landscape, and at length rolled into the interurban station of the bustling capital, the largest city I had as yet seen.  I did not see much of it, however, on this first visit, as we went quickly around the handsome Soldiers’ Monument to the office of the American Express Company on Meridian Street.  I was given over in charge of a man there who very briskly weighed me and asked my parent my value.  My parent seemed to be in a good deal of a dilemma as to this.  He hemmed and hawed and finally replied:  “Well, I hardly know.”

“Is its value inestimable?” inquired the clerk.  “Why, in a way I guess you might say it is,” said my parent.

Finally, against the clerk’s mounting impatience, an estimate was effected, and I was declared to be worth $500.  I was cast carelessly on to a pile of other packages of various shapes and sizes, and my parent, giving me a farewell lingering look of love, went out the door.

Of my journey there is not much to say.  I arrived in New York amid a prodigious crush of packages, and was delivered, in company with about a dozen others, which I knew to be brother or rival, manuscripts, at the office of a great publishing house.  Here I was signed for, and, in the course of the day, unwrapped.  I was ticketed with a number and my title, and placed in a tall cabinet, where I remained in the society of several shelves full of other manuscripts for a number of days.  Here I was delighted to find quite a coterie of fellow-Hoosiers.  But a remarkable proportion of my associates, I discovered, was from the South.  The majority of us hailed from small towns.  In our company were three or four of somewhat distinguished lineage.

As time passed and nothing happened, I grew somewhat nervous, as I knew with what anxiety my dear parent in Indiana would be counting the days.  One of my new-found friends, a portly manuscript (a story of sponge-fishers) that had been out of the cabinet and had had a reading before my arrival, told me in the way of gossip something of the situation at the moment in this house.  My friend was an old campaigner, very ragged and battered in appearance, and had been (I was appalled to hear) submitted to seventeen publishing houses before arriving here.  It had lost all hope of any justice in the publishing world, and was very cynical.  Heavens! would I------

However, it appeared that at this house the first reader had just been obliged to take a vacation owing to ill-health occasioned by too assiduous application to her task of attempting to keep somewhere abreast of the incoming flood of manuscripts.  She was, it seems, a large elderly lady who had tried out her own talents as a novelist without marked success some twenty years ago.  Her niece, a miss of twenty