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thousand manuscripts, of which on an average only one in two hundred is accepted. About six hundred book manuscripts a year are offered to his firm for publication, and of these somewhat less than two per cent. are accepted. These figures may seem depressing to authors, but it should be borne in mind that they show the manuscript demand of one firm, and that very many of the manuscripts rejected by that firm no doubt find acceptance elsewhere. Instead of discouraging writers, these statistics should teach them to be persistent. If a manuscript is good, it will find acceptance somewhere, and the writer should keep on trying with it until he succeeds in placing it, or until he is convinced by a long series of rejections that the manuscript really is not good.

W. H. H.

WRITERS OF THE DAY.

Roe L. Hendrick, whose story, “A Pair of Pintos,'" appeared in the Youth's Companion for June 12, was born in western New York in 1867, and except for a trial at school teaching in his late teens has devoted his entire life to newspaper and literary work. He learned to set type and chase "locals and ads." before he could vote, and then worked as a reporter and telegraph editor in Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, and New York. In 1891 a chance paragraph contributed to the New York Herald led to a request for more, and for the next eight years Mr. Hendrick devoted himself to "jokes," — i.e., paragraphs, dialogues, and jingles. At the outset there were not more than a dozen writers in the entire country who made a serious business of "small humor," and the reward was ampie, considering the outlay of labor, it being easy to pick up from fifty to a hundred dollars a week. Passing years, however, brought a degree of competition that seriously curtailed the reward, and Mr. Hendrick turned to juvenile fiction. In the past ten years he has written nearly a thousand short stories, which have been

published in all of the leading young people's periodicals, the Youth's Companion alone having printed scores of these adventure and farm tales In addition to writing stories, Mr. Hendrick has spent seven years as managing editor of papers in Ithaca, N. Y., Titusville, Penn., and elsewhere, but he now confines himself entirely to story-writing. His home is in Wolcott, N. Y.

Ethelyn Leslie Huston, who had a story, "The Man in Gray," in Ainslee's Magazine for June, is a newspaper woman who is now director of the welfare work in the store of the L. S. Donaldson Company, of Minneapolis. Mrs. Huston was born in Toronto, Canada, and received her early education in a convent school. Later she went to live in Nebraska and was graduated from Bellevue College. She began her newspaper work on the Westside Star, a weekly paper in Cleveland, where she spent three years. Then she joined the editorial staff of the Cleveland Press, and later wrote for the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Record-Herald, and the Chicago Chronicle, acting as dramatic critic on the Chronicle. While in Chicago she was vice president of the Independent Pen Woman's club, an organization which brought such men as Elbert Hubbard, Edwin Markham, and Vereshchagin, the famous Russian artist, to the city. Before going to Minneapolis, Mrs. Huston was on the Sunday staff of the New York Herald, and she is now a regular contributor to the New York World syndicate. Her stories have been published in the Smart Set, Ainslee's, and other magazines. When she was on the Cleveland Press, Mrs. Huston spent a week in the Ohio State prison. It was known that deplorable conditions existed there, and to get convincing proof one night she disguised herself, went down into one of the tenement districts of the city, got arrested derelict, and was sentenced to a week's imprisonment. The story that she wrote of her experiences reformed conditions in the

as a

prison and drove out the superintendent in disgrace.

Francis M. Kieron, whose paper, "The Battle of Guilford Court House," has just been published in the Journal of American History (New York) for the first quarter of 1913, was born in Iowa, but later lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he attended St. Thomas College. He married Miss Margaret A. Thornton, of St. Paul, who is a graduate of the academic department of the University of Minnesota. Mr. Kieron's essays on literature and history have appeared in general publications, but it is only lately that he has written for historical magazines, and he regards this work as a kind of forerunner for a complete history of the American Revolution which he has anticipated for some time. For years he has been greatly interested in the American history of the middle and latter part of the eighteenth century. Americana. of New York, will publish his second magazine paper, an article on the Life of Montcalm, in its August number. Mr. and Mrs. Kieron now live in Beaumont, California.

PERSONAL GOSSIP ABOUT AUTHORS.

Burnett. Clitton Heights, Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett's place in Bermuda, is about midway between Hamilton and St. George. Mrs. Burnett says she expects herself to work at her desk each morning, though she confesses with a laugh that the lure of her gardens at times is irresistible. That this often has been the case recently accounts for the fact that the final chapters of "T. Tembarom," now [April] appearing serially, are not finished.

"I never sit down and plan a book," she explained. "At first, something comes to me which usually is nebulous. It does not exactly float into my mind, but seems rather to float about it, as a bird might flutter near, after having decided to get acquainted. Whatever it is, I do not interfere with it never try to corral it and think it out, but

just put it out of my mind and let it take its course, and in time it completes itself. Then, and not until then, I begin writing, and work rapidly and without stress."

Some of her stories, Mrs. Burnett says, have their beginning in incidents which are brought to her attention. This was the case with her story, "T. Tembarom," in which the hero is a real person, who still is alive.

"I was confined to my bed," she said, in speaking of the origin of that story, "by a severe hurt in a carriage accident, and to relieve the tedium of a long convalescence a young relative often came to see me. To lead me to forget my discomfort, he related the laugh-provoking experiences he had when, a soldier of fortune, he was making his start in life. At first I was just entertained and did not think of what he told me as material. Then I began to fancy what a person taken suddenly from the life and surroundings this young man described would do if he found himself in the English environment I wrote of in The Shuttle." A story began to take form, and after a time completed itself, though I have been slow in setting it down. You see, I had two gardens to make and to encourage after they were made, and time does slip away at such a rate when one is working with a garden."

This led to a discussion of the latest of her literary children. I said I did not see how she was going to bring things out comfortably for all concerned. Mrs. Burnett laughed with the abandon of a girl, as she exclaimed:

"Good! I am so glad you can't see how it's coming out! That really is nice to hear." New York Times.

Chesterton. Mr. Chesterton has been indulging in autobiography. "I appeared in a form more or less human," he writes, "on the top of Campden Hill, Kensington, and was christened in the little St. George's Church, close to the tall water works tower. I went to St. Paul's School, where I did no work, but wrote a lot of bad poetry, which has, fortunately, perished with the almost

equally bad exercises. I got a prize for one of those prize poems which stand as the salutary humiliations at the head of so many paths of journalism and literature. Golly! What a poem! It had a sturdy Protestant tone. It was about St. Francis Xavier, of whom I had never heard. Before I left school I had been a member of a little amateur club with a little amateur magazine, in which the beginnings of intelligence were fairly brighter. Most of my friends went to Oxford, but I played at learning to illustrate books and then went and read manuscripts in a publisher's office. In the first experiment I discovered that I could not draw pictures, but that I could talk about them; and I think the first things of mine properly printed were two isolated reviews of art books in the Bookman. Then I became absorbed in the publisher's manuscripts, but not in the right way. Every day my critical reports became of more interest to me and of less use to him, until I suddenly realized the fact that I was some sort of journalist, and bowed myself out. I owe it to my friends and to my luck that, though I had no money in particular and married on very much less than a hundred pounds a year, I never was put to the ultimate Fleet street test that drives men to intellectual prostitution. By a coincidence, a kind of work came to my hand from a group which, though not prosperous and quite the reverse of popular, thought and talked much as I did, so that I felt but little break with the crude convictions of my boyhood. My old friends at Oxford had mingled with a very original and sincere school of politicians who were reasserting an idealistic liberalism, a traditional praise of liberty, against both the most powerful fashions of that time. At that time at Oxford everything that was moral was socialist. Everything that was immoral was imperialist. Mr. Belloc, Mr. Hammond, J. S. Phillimore, and the rest thus fought with two unpopularities at once. The outbreak of the South African war seemed to them a sort of signal for a direct defiance of what they thought (as I did, and as I do to this

day), the sheer devil-worship of commercial empire and compulsory colonial expansion. They founded the Pro-Boer Speaker, a spirited paper, from which some of the first books from Belloc and myself were pulled and patched together. My friend, Mr. Oldershaw now, by all the thundering wheels of time, a J. P. - pestered these poor people with my articles; and I never shall be so proud of anything again as I was then of my companions and of my cause. Whether I could now be so happy and so universally hated I do not know; but I would try. The result of this sort of Oxford skirmish was that, when the midnight of jingoism had passed, and the Daily News had been recovered for the older liberal tradition, the new editor, R. C. Lehman, gave me a place upon that paper. In that paper I have written a vast amount of nonsense and also, I happen to think, a great deal of sense."

CURRENT LITERARY TOPICS.

In

How a Successful Play was Made.-- Bayard Veiller tells in the Metropolitan for June how he wrote "Within the Law." It was done to bear out an assertion he made that the popular, lurid crook melodrama is the easiest stuff in the world to turn out, and that he could do one in a month. "Within the Law" was written in three weeks. its original form it was an attack on the jury system. The character corresponding to Gilder, the department store proprietor, was the judge who sentenced Mary Turner to prison. Mary was pretty much as she is now, a salesgirl accused of theft. The scene of the first act was a court room. The jury had been out all night. Everybody was worn out with the long, tedious wait for the verdict. The jury filed in, sleepy, blear-eyed, and cross. The proceedings were hurried as much as possible. The clerk of the court gabbled through the usual formulas. The foreman in a weary voice announced the verdict of "guilty."

"In a word," says Mr. Veiller. "I showed the case of a girl who was being railroaded to prison in order that the judge

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might get away on a hunting trip, and that everybody else concerned might hurry through with their work. The judge pronounced sentence -three years - and it was to him instead of the department store proprietor that Mary Turner made the speech that now ends the first act of 'Within the Law.'

"I did not have to invent this. Such conditions actually exist and have existed for years. I knew the whole police and criminal courts situation backward, thanks to my experience of several years as a reporter. I covered' police headquarters in New York for a long period before I took to play writing. During that time Theodore Roosevelt was police commissioner, Jake' Riis was doing headquarters for the Sun, Lincoln Steffens for the Evening Post, and I for the Evening Mail. In no other way can a man acquire such a thorough knowledge of and insight into the realities that make our civilization hideous, as by the work that falls to the lot of a police reporter. He knows the inside of the system by which poor people are exploited for the benefit of the unscrupulous. He sees nothing but the reverse of the medal. He learns the hollowness of the pretenses by which the system is maintained.

"The next three acts developed naturally out of this situation. It is only right to make due acknowledgment to Alexandre Dumas, for, as you have no doubt recog nized, the idea of the person wrongfully convicted and imprisoned carrying out a systematic plan of vengeance is nothing but the plot of Monte Cristo.' The main difference is that it is a girl instead of a man. Most of the managers I subsequently took the play to threw up their hands in horror at this idea. They declared we never in the world could win the sympathy of audiences for a woman who devoted all her energies to revenge. They could not see that this is one of the most elemental feelings in human nature. Some big elemental feeling must be the basis of all drama. And the instinct to say I'll get even with you' is one of the most universal. I made the

girl set out deliberately to injure the man who had sent her to prison. The natural thing for her to consider was: Where can I hurt him most? Obviously his affection for his boy was his tenderest spot. Moreover, as he had irreparably ruined her life, it was logical for her to attack his. And the best way to damage it was to associate it by marriage with that of a convicted felon, so that by marrying his son she inflicted a two-fold injury on her enemy. Hence her crucial speech in the second act: 'You took away my name and gave me a number. Now I have given up that number and I've got your name!'

"The change in the first act from an attack on the jury system to an attack on department stores came about in this way: I set aside the court room scene so as to use it in another play. I left the heroine as she was, a salesgirl wrongfully accused of theft. And I made her plight the basis of an attack on the department store system in particular and Our economic system in general. I am free to admit that I saw the pictorial value of existing conditions and particularly for the first act of 'Within the Law.' They made a first act just as suitable as the previous one that 1 set aside for future use. The subsequent acts followed it just as naturally as they followed the other..

"To return to the original process. Knowing the police methods, it was perfectly easy to imagine the girl's history after she was let out of jail. It is the almost invariable practice of the police when they see an ex-convict to warn the employer. So naturally the first thing that would have happened to Mary Turner soon after she obtained a job would be for a detective to come into the shop and give the boss full information about her. After a few attempts to earn an honest living, being determined not to become a prostitute, she would say to herself: "Oh, very well; if they won't let me be honest I'll get money in the same way the big, successful crooks, the politicians, and the grafters gets theirs, — dishonestly, but within the law. At the

same time I made her execute her scheme for revenge on Gilder.

"The fourth act I stole. Almost every incident in it is a matter of public record. The third degree trick worked on Joe Garson by Inspector Burke in the play is precisely the same trick that was carried out by Inspector Byrnes, undoubtedly the best policeman who ever lived, on a crook named McGloin. Everybody down at headquarters knows about it in fact it is related in Byrnes's book.

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"As for the trap laid for Mary Turner by the inspector, that also was comparatively easy. Police methods are invariably simple. Whenever they want to catch criminals and cannot procure evidence the policy is to entrap them into committing some crime at which they can be caught. This they do by means of a stool pigeon; hence the character of English Eddie.' Originally I had the woman take part in the burglary of Gilder's home for additional revenge. It was thanks to an excellent suggestion from Charles Klein that I changed this. He pointed out that this would alienate the audiences' sympathy, which her previous wrongs had won for her. Accordingly, I had her go to Gilder's house, not to share in but to prevent the robbery. Then occurred the problem of how to account for her finding out about the burglary scheme. One thing a playwright always has to avoid is giving audiences cause to puzzle over any point. Once they do that their attention is distracted from the action and the suspense is broken. It was Roi Megrue who suggested that I have the inspector telephone her anonymously so as to inveigle her into the trap. These changes were made after the play had opened in Chicago.

"The Maxim silencer business I put in because there was a great deal in the newspapers about the invention just at the time I was writing the piece. I think every play should be, as largely as possible, a reflex of what is in the papers at the present time — not only in lesser details such as this, but in larger affairs. When the silencer was publicly tested it was said that reporters in the next room had been unable to hear the

sound of the shot. So I thought: If reporters, why not policemen ?' The introduction of the incident in the second act, when Joe Garson shows how effective the silencer is by shooting at a vase, was merely a matter of ordinary technical skill. You must let the audience see things like that for themselves it is not sufficient to explain them.

"Incidentally, a great many people who saw the play have wondered whether the vase is really shot. If guns used on the stage were actually loaded with bullets I shudder to think of the calamities that might follow. I would not trust my life to the marksmanship of the average actor. There is a very simple mechanism by which the vase is smashed at just the right moment in such a way that it seems to have been shattered by a bullet.

"The revolving searchlight from the Metropolitan tower which flashes in through the window in the third act and reveals the dead body of English Eddie to Inspector Burke was the result of mere accident. This was not in the play originally, but was introduced during the Chicago run of the piece. For some time, however, I felt the need of a spot light to account for the inspector's seeing the body while the room was almost in total darkness. But I could not figure out any plausible excuse for bringing it in. One afternoon I was talking to Al Woods in his room on the sixth floor of the Sherman House in Chicago. Suddenly a bright light was reflected on the ceiling from the street. I jumped up, went to the window and saw that a wagon was passing by with a large plate of glass. This had caught the sunlight and flashed it up into the room. That gave me the idea for the third act: Why not a searchlight ?' I remembered that there were two such in New York, one on top of the Hippodrome and the other on the Metropolitan tower, and it just became a question of which was the more expedient to use.

"When Archie Selwyn, who was, still is, and always will be, my business agent, took over the play from Mr. Brady, he paid Mr. Brady ten thousand dol

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