or so, who had a fancy for an editorial career and who had vainly been seeking a situation of this character for some time, found a windfall in the instant need for a substitute first reader.  It was with some petulance, it struck me, that she yanked the door open one day.  She was, apparently, showing some one about her office.  “All that,” she said, waving her hand toward my case, “practically untouched; and mountains besides.  I don’t know how I’m to get away with it.  I suppose I’ll have to do a couple every night.”  I don’t know what time it was, but the light was going and the young lady had got into bed when she began to read me, propped up against her knees.  She yawned now and then and sighed repeatedly as she shifted back my pages.  I thought I noticed that her, knees swayed, just perceptibly, at times.  Then suddenly my support sank to one side; I started to slide, and would have plunged to the floor, very nearly pulling her after me, if the disturbance had not as suddenly caught the young lady back into wild consciousness, and she grabbed me and her knees and the slipping bedclothes all in a lump.  Shortly after this she turned back to see how I ended, and then went to sleep comfortably, lights out.

I did not see the report the young lady wrote of me, but I had occasion to think that she declared I was rather stupid.  However, I got another reading.  I was given next to a young man, not, so I understood, a regular reader, but a member of the advertising department who was frequently called on to help weed out manuscript, who took me home with him and threw me onto a couch littered with books and papers.  Here I stayed for ever so long.  One day I heard the young man say to his wife, nodding toward me:  “I ought to try to get that unfortunate thing off my hands before my vacation, but I never seem to get around to it.”  As, alack-a-day! he did not get around to me before that occasion, I went, packed in the bottom of a trunk, with the young man and his wife on their annual holiday.  In my pitchy gaol I had, of course, no means of calculating the flight of time, but when I next saw the light, after what seemed to me an interminable spell, I appeared to be the occasion of some excitement.  The young man brought me up after several vigorous dives into the bottom of the trunk, as his wife was saying with much energy:  “Well, of course, you can do as you please, but if I were you I’d telegraph an answer right straight back that I did not propose to spend my vacation working for them.  The idea!  After all you do!” “Oh, well,” was the young man’s reply, “some poor dog of an author wrote the thing, and it’s only right that he should have some kind of an answer within a reasonable time.  I ought to have got around to it long ago.”