subject with his proposed writer, and he discussed it from every possible point of view.  He would take him to lunch or to dinner; in his quiet way he would draw him out, find whether he really knew much about the subject, learn the attitude that he was likely to take, and delicately slip in suggestions of his own.  Not infrequently this preliminary interview would disclose that the much sought writer, despite appearances, was not the one who was destined for that particular job; in this case Page would find some way of shunting him in favour of a more promising candidate.  But Page was no mere chaser of names; there was nothing of the literary tuft-hunter about his editorial methods.  He liked to see such men as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William Graham Sumner, Charles W. Eliot, Frederic Harrison, Paul Bourget, and the like upon his title page—­and here these and many other similarly distinguished authors appeared—­but the greatest name could not attain a place there if the letter press that followed were unworthy.  Indeed Page’s habit of throwing out the contributions of the great, after paying a stiff price for them, caused much perturbation in his counting room.  One day he called in one of his associates.

“Do you see that waste basket?” he asked, pointing to a large receptacle filled to overflowing with manuscripts.  “All our Cleveland articles are there!”

He had gone to great trouble and expense to obtain a series of six articles from the most prominent publicists and political leaders of the country on the first year of Mr. Cleveland’s second administration.  It was to be the “feature” of the number then in preparation.

“There isn’t one of them,” he declared, “who has got the point.  I have thrown them all away and I am going to try to write something myself.”

And he spent a couple of days turning out an article which aroused great public interest.  When Page commissioned an article, he meant simply that he would pay full price for it; whether he would publish it depended entirely upon the quality of the material itself.  But Page was just as severe upon his own writings as upon those of other men.  He wrote occasionally—­always under a nom-de-plume; but he had great difficulty in satisfying his own editorial standards.  After finishing an article he would commonly send for one of his friends and read the result.

“That is superb!” this admiring associate would sometimes say.

In response Page would take the manuscript and, holding it aloft in two hands, tear it into several bits, and throw the scraps into the waste basket.

“Oh, I can do better than that,” he would laugh and in another minute he was busy rewriting the article, from beginning to end.