thunder and smell of brimstone, and finished with the promise that in the next chapter, after holding a general inquest, he would take up the surviving character of the novel and tell what became of the devil!  It read with singular smoothness, and with a “dead” earnestness that was funny enough to suffocate a body.  But there was war when it came in.  The other novelists were furious.  The mild stranger, not yet more than half sober, stood there, under a scathing fire of vituperation, meek and bewildered, looking from one to another of his assailants, and wondering what he could have done to invoke such a storm.  When a lull came at last, he said his say gently and appealingly—­said he did not rightly remember what he had written, but was sure he had tried to do the best he could, and knew his object had been to make the novel not only pleasant and plausible but instructive and——­

The bombardment began again.  The novelists assailed his ill-chosen adjectives and demolished them with a storm of denunciation and ridicule.  And so the siege went on.  Every time the stranger tried to appease the enemy he only made matters worse.  Finally he offered to rewrite the chapter.  This arrested hostilities.  The indignation gradually quieted down, peace reigned again and the sufferer retired in safety and got him to his own citadel.

But on the way thither the evil angel tempted him and he got drunk again.  And again his imagination went mad.  He led the heroes and heroines a wilder dance than ever; and yet all through it ran that same convincing air of honesty and earnestness that had marked his first work.  He got the characters into the most extraordinary situations, put them through the most surprising performances, and made them talk the strangest talk!  But the chapter cannot be described.  It was symmetrically crazy; it was artistically absurd; and it had explanatory footnotes that were fully as curious as the text.  I remember one of the “situations,” and will offer it as an example of the whole.  He altered the character of the brilliant lawyer, and made him a great-hearted, splendid fellow; gave him fame and riches, and set his age at thirty-three years.  Then he made the blonde discover, through the help of the Roscicrucian and the melodramatic miscreant, that while the Duke loved her money ardently and wanted it, he secretly felt a sort of leaning toward the society-young-lady.  Stung to the quick, she tore her affections from him and bestowed them with tenfold power upon the lawyer, who responded with consuming zeal.  But the parents would none of it.  What they wanted in the family was a Duke; and a Duke they were determined to have; though they confessed that next to the Duke the lawyer had their preference.  Necessarily the blonde now went into a decline.  The parents were alarmed.  They pleaded with her to marry the Duke, but she steadfastly refused, and pined on.  Then they laid a plan.  They told her to wait a year and a day, and if at the end