of a humming-bird and the tenacity of a bulldog to the virtues of their illustrative process, and had worked it for all it was worth.  There were seven papers in the number, and a poem on the last page of the cover, and he had found some graphic comment for each.  It was a larger proportion than would afterward be allowed, but for once in a way it was allowed.  Fulkerson said they could not expect to get their money back on that first number, anyway.  Seven of the illustrations were Beaton’s; two or three he got from practised hands; the rest were the work of unknown people which he had suggested, and then related and adapted with unfailing ingenuity to the different papers.  He handled the illustrations with such sympathy as not to destroy their individual quality, and that indefinable charm which comes from good amateur work in whatever art.  He rescued them from their weaknesses and errors, while he left in them the evidence of the pleasure with which a clever young man, or a sensitive girl, or a refined woman had done them.  Inevitably from his manipulation, however, the art of the number acquired homogeneity, and there was nothing casual in its appearance.  The result, March eagerly owned, was better than the literary result, and he foresaw that the number would be sold and praised chiefly for its pictures.  Yet he was not ashamed of the literature, and he indulged his admiration of it the more freely because he had not only not written it, but in a way had not edited it.  To be sure, he had chosen all the material, but he had not voluntarily put it all together for that number; it had largely put itself together, as every number of every magazine does, and as it seems more and more to do, in the experience of every editor.  There had to be, of course, a story, and then a sketch of travel.  There was a literary essay and a social essay; there was a dramatic trifle, very gay, very light; there was a dashing criticism on the new pictures, the new plays, the new books, the new fashions; and then there was the translation of a bit of vivid Russian realism, which the editor owed to Lindau’s exploration of the foreign periodicals left with him; Lindau was himself a romanticist of the Victor Hugo sort, but he said this fragment of Dostoyevski was good of its kind.  The poem was a bit of society verse, with a backward look into simpler and wholesomer experiences.

Fulkerson was extremely proud of the number; but he said it was too good—­too good from every point of view.  The cover was too good, and the paper was too good, and that device of rough edges, which got over the objection to uncut leaves while it secured their aesthetic effect, was a thing that he trembled for, though he rejoiced in it as a stroke of the highest genius.  It had come from Beaton at the last moment, as a compromise, when the problem of the vulgar croppiness of cut leaves and the unpopularity of uncut leaves seemed to have no solution but suicide.  Fulkerson was still morally crawling round on his hands