“No doubt,” said Demosthenes.  “Have all the class clubs you want, but do not make one of this.  An Authors’ Club, where none but authors are admitted, is a good thing.  The members learn there that there are other authors than themselves.  Poets’ Clubs are a good thing; they bring poets into contact with each other, and they learn what a bore it is to have to listen to a poet reading his own poem.  Pugilists’ Clubs are good; so are all other class clubs; but so also are clubs like our own, which takes in all who are worthy.  Here a poet can talk poetry as much as he wants, but at the same time he hears something besides poetry.  We must stick to our original idea.”

“Then let us do something to abate the nuisance of which I complain,” said Confucius.  “Can’t we adopt a house rule that poets must not be inspired between the hours of 11 A.M. and 5 P.M., or in the evening after eight; that any poet discovered using more than five arm-chairs in the composition of a quatrain will be charged two oboli an hour for each chair in excess of that number; and that the billiard-marker shall be required to charge a premium of three times the ordinary fee for tables used by versifiers in lieu of writing-pads?”

“That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” said Sir Walter Raleigh.  “I, as a poet would not object to that.  I do all my work at home, anyhow.”

“There’s another phase of this business that we haven’t considered yet, and it’s rather important,” said Demosthenes, taking a fresh pebble out of his bonbonniere.  “That’s in the matter of stationery.  This club, like all other well-regulated clubs, provides its members with a suitable supply of writing materials.  Charon informs me that the waste-baskets last week turned out forty-two reams of our best correspondence paper on which these poets had scribbled the first draft of their verses.  Now I don’t think the club should furnish the poets with the raw material for their poems any more than, to go back to Confucius’s shoemaker, it should supply leather for our cobblers.”

“What do you mean by raw material for poems?” asked Sir Walter, with a frown.

“Pen, ink, and paper.  What else?” said Demosthenes.

“Doesn’t it take brains to write a poem?” said Raleigh.

“Doesn’t it take brains to make a pair of shoes?” retorted Demosthenes, swallowing a pebble in his haste.

“They’ve got a right to the stationery, though,” put in Blackstone.  “A clear legal right to it.  If they choose to write poems on the paper instead of boring people to death with letters, as most of us do, that’s their own affair.”

“Well, they’re very wasteful,” said Demosthenes.

“We can meet that easily enough,” observed Cassius.  “Furnish each writing-table with a slate.  I should think they’d be pleased with that.  It’s so much easier to rub out the wrong word.”

“Most poets prefer to rub out the right word,” growled Confucius.  “Besides, I shall never consent to slates in this house-boat.  The squeaking of the pencils would be worse than the poems themselves.”