“’He receives two or three books daily, with requests to read and give his opinion about each of them, which opinion, if it has a word which can be used as an advertisement, he will find quoted in all the newspapers.

“’He receives thick masses of manuscript, prose and verse, which he is called upon to examine and pronounce on their merits; these manuscripts having almost invariably been rejected by the editors to whom they have been sent, and having as a rule no literary value whatever.

“’He is expected to sign petitions, to contribute to journals, to write for fairs, to attend celebrations, to make after-dinner speeches, to send money for objects he does not believe in to places he never heard of.

“’He is called on to keep up correspondences with unknown admirers, who begin by saying they have no claim upon his time, and then appropriate it by writing page after page, if of the male sex; and sheet after sheet, if of the other.

“’If a poet, it is taken for granted that he can sit down at any moment and spin off any number of verses on any subject which may be suggested to him; such as congratulations to the writer’s great-grandmother on her reaching her hundredth year, an elegy on an infant aged six weeks, an ode for the Fourth of July in a Western township not to be found in Lippincott’s last edition, perhaps a valentine for some bucolic lover who believes that wooing in rhyme is the way to win the object of his affections.’

“Is n’t it so?  I asked the Celebrity.

“’I would bet on the prose lover.  She will show the verses to him, and they will both have a good laugh over them.’

“I have only reported a small part of the conversation I had with the Literary Celebrity.  He was so much taken up with his pleasing self-contemplation, while I made him air his opinions and feelings and spread his characteristics as his laundress spreads and airs his linen on the clothes-line, that I don’t believe it ever occurred to him that he had been in the hands of an interviewer until he found himself exposed to the wind and sunshine in full dimensions in the columns of The People’s Perennial and Household Inquisitor.’”

After the reading of this paper, much curiosity was shown as to who the person spoken of as the “Literary Celebrity” might be.  Among the various suppositions the startling idea was suggested that he was neither more nor less than the unexplained personage known in the village as Maurice Kirkwood.  Why should that be his real name?  Why should not he be the Celebrity, who had taken this name and fled to this retreat to escape from the persecutions of kind friends, who were pricking him and stabbing him nigh to death with their daggers of sugar candy?

The Secretary of the Pansophian Society determined to question the Interviewer the next time she met him at the Library, which happened soon after the meeting when his paper was read.

“I do not know,” she said, in the course of a conversation in which she had spoken warmly of his contribution to the literary entertainment of the Society, “that you mentioned the name of the Literary Celebrity whom you interviewed so successfully.”