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promptness, unfortunately, is not usual. All this, of course, applies to ordinary manuscripts. Sometimes, however, a manuscript is "timely," and may lose its value for other editors if the editor who receives it fondles it too long. In such cases it is common for the author submitting the manuscript to call attention to its "timeliness" and to ask the editor for an early decision. How long is an editor justified in keeping such a manuscript, in case he does not accept it?

The question has come up recently in a New York court. A special writer submitted a "timely" article to Collier's Weekly, and the editor returned it after holding it two weeks. The author, feeling aggrieved, brought suit for damages against the paper, alleging that the value of the article had been destroyed by the delay. The justice has decided the case in favor of the editor of Collier's, ruling that the return of an article within two weeks is a reasonably prompt decision," even though by the delay the news value of the matter is dimin ished or destroyed.

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W. H. H.

"NEWSPAPER ENGLISH" EDITED.

San Domingo is indulging in another revolution.

What interests Washington are the disclosures made by Mr. Knox.

Jeffries' manager announces he will fight Jack Johnson.

As the sexes are nowadays being played off against one another in contemporary discussion and social philosophy.

46

Santo Domingo is indulging in another revolution.

What interests Washington is the disclosures made by Mr. Knox.

an

Jeffries' manager
nounces that Jeffries
will fight Jack Johnson.
As
the sexes are
nowadays being played
off against each other in
contemporary discussion
and social philosophy.

WRITERS OF THE DAY.

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ster still quite fresh, since she is only twenty-two. Mrs. Adams is a water-color artist of considerable reputation, and has furnished the cover designs for the forthcoming issues of several important magazines. Her mornings are always spent in the studio with the brush and palette, while her writing is done in the afternoon, whenever she can spare time from horseback riding, which is her favorite sport. One of the distinguishing features of Mrs. Adams's literary career is that her very first story was accepted, and she has yet to receive one of those "implies no lack of merit" slips from the publishers.

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"The

Florence Martin, whose stories, Calumny" and "The Uplifting of Effie," appeared in recent numbers of the Century Magazine the latter being printed in the October number is Mrs. H. H. Martin, of Lake Forest, Ill. She is a New Yorker by birth and education, though her present home is in Illinois, where she leads a quiet Mlife in the country, with books and a garden and agreeable neighbors as her chief interests. "The Uplifting of Effie" is a little satire on play-philanthropy which was suggested to Mrs. Martin during her connection with a working girls' luncheon club, where the valuable help afforded by earnest and sensible women to genuine workers was occasionally frustrated by impulsive and unwise sentimentality. Also, the story casts an animadversive glance at the idle lives of the daughters of prosperous families, whose ideals are adopted by their humbler sisters. Mm, 3

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Leslie Adams, whose story of child-life, Suretogo," appeared in the Red Book for October, is the wife of Frank R. Adams, of Chicago, the author of a dozen successful musical comedies. "Suretogo" is the first of a series of child stories, the material for which the author has largely gathered from her own recollections of herself as a young

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will always tend to percolate through the social strata. If fashionable functions and fine clothing constitute the main interest of wealthy women, she says, their poorer sisters will painfully try to follow them along their futile path.

George L. Parker, who had a story, "Twice as Many as Before," in the Delineator for October, is a Kentuckian, and was graduated from Yale in 1897, and from the Cambridge (Mass.) Episcopal Theological School in 1900. After ministry in California, Mr. Parker spent three years abroad, during two of which, from 1906 to 1908, he was pastor of the British-American church in St. Petersburg. Returning to this country last October, he has since been pastor of the Crombie-street Congregational church in Salem, Mass. "Twice as Many as Before" is his second story to be printed, the first, "The Way It Was Settled," having appeared in the Ladies' Realm (or World) some time last fall.. The Scottish Review of Edinburgh, in August, 1906, published Mr. Parker's appreciation of the blind Dr. Matheson. Mr. Parker has also had published in the last year, by Salem D. Towne, Boston, a pamphlet on the Emmanuel Movement, called "The Other Side of PsychoTheraphy." The Congregationalist now has on hand two accepted stories of his, which will soon appear.

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Hugo's letter was hyperbolic and in these terms "Your work has given me a profound pleasure, under the impression of which I hasten to congratulate you. Your fame is young and radiant; mine is declining. It is the salutation of the night which departs at the rising of the dawn. You are shining, and I am dying. You emerge from oblivion; I return there.

"The heart either grows hard or breaks forth. Your sentiments have come forth, and you have written sonorous and superb poetry, which consecrates you as poet as well as affirming you as man; you are then 'deux fois mon frère.' Accept my admiration, as great as my esteem." - London Globe.

Lecky. Sir Lauder Brunton discusses the question of fatigue, in a long paper in the Practitioner.

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"One constantly hears the complaint from patients," he writes, that they are always tired, and indeed some people avoid working on the ground that they are constitu-tionally tired. Other people term them simply lazy, but it is quite possible that in many of these cases there is some physical condition in the person which renders exertion specially distasteful to them, although other people cannot observe it."

In discussing the relation between mental and physical fatigue, he says: "It is clear that in regard to fatigue the brain and the muscles go together, and it is a mistake to regard muscular fatigue as a stimulus to the brain, or mental fatigue as a stimulus to the muscles." Long-continued muscular exertion renders the brain anæmic. This fact

the famous physician illustrates in the following story :

"Many years ago I used to write for a medical periodical. On returning home one day after a very heavy day's work at the hospital, and feeling completely exhausted, I found a note from the editor: Please let me have an article on such and such a subject to-night.' I sat down with pen and paper before me, but not a word could I write.

"Then I lay back lazily, and began to speculate as to the cause of my want of ideas. I thought: The brain is the same as it was yesterday, but yesterday I was not tired; perhaps it is the feebler circulation that prevents the brain from acting. If the blood does not go up to the brain, I may bring the brain down to the blood.' I therefore placed my head flat on the table, looking sideways at the paper, and began to write easily.

"On raising my head again every idea fled, so I placed my head again down on the table, and finished the article with my head in that position.

"A similar instance was afforded by the practice of the late Mr. Lecky, the historian. He had a large, magnificent head, mounted upon a long neck and a willowy body. He found out that his circulation was not sufficiently strong to raise the blood to his brain in sufficient quantity for its functional activity in the upright position..

"A mutual friend informed me that he wrote his History' lying upon the sofa. I was so much interested in the question that I asked Mr. Lecky himself. He told me that this was a mistake; that he did not lie down, but actually wrote kneeling on a sofa which had a large, broad head to it.

"This served him for a writing table, and in this kneeling position he wrote all his works, the blood having thus to travel to his brain in a horizontal line, instead of upward against the force of gravity, as it would have to do in the sitting position."

Reade. In an English review is recalled the method in which Charles Reade constructed his romances directly from docu

ments. The review says, among other things:

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Charles Reade spent five hours a day in a room that he called 'the workshop.' The most conspicuous piece of furniture in this room was a large table, battered and worn, underneath which there stood an odd score of tall folios, the nature of their contents being indicated by labels upon the backs. At this table Charles Reade would sit, selecting, cutting, and pasting into its proper place every scrap of fact or experience, written or printed, that he judged to contain anything of interest - anything, that is, which might conceivably be of use to him as literary material. Everything was indexed. Anything could be found at a moment's notice. The culmination of the system was to be found in the Index ad Indices. From the Index ad Indices he could find his way to the correct index. From the correct index he could find his way to the. particular slip or cutting that he wanted, at the moment. His workshop was a triumph of method. His art was a triumph of empiricism.

"It was the peculiarity of Charles Reade that he must begin with dry bones in order to arrive at something very like flesh and blood. He had the power to imagine and to inform his creatures with the breath of life, but his imagination was of the kind that abhorred a vacuum. Taking certain facts which he had seen correlated in his actual experience, he would pass them through his intelligence, plunge them into the great reservoirs of his emotion, and bring them forth, again more real than reality itself. The greater artists dare more highly than this. They get their fundamental truths from life; and, having these touchstones, they build up their masterpieces by rearranging and not necessarily by accepting what they see. Charles Reade had not enough imagination for this. He was safe only in his workshop. There he could not go wrong. He had all his facts to hand. He had imagination enough to explain them, to quicken them into something more real; but his imagination

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"I started to write a book on the Venice of the Doges, but had to lay it aside on account of the extraordinary complexity and peculiarity of Venetian history. I no longer have inspirations like that which produced 'Quo Vadis.' That I obtained by studying three masterpieces; one by Tacitus, my favorite among the Latin classics; one by Chateaubriand, 'The Genius of Christianity'; and, most valued of all, Cardinal Wiseman's Fabiola,' a beautiful, picturesque .story which fascinated me in boyhood.

"I a

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am now revising for an autumn volume a novelette, to be called 'The Whirlwind,' which appeared lately in a Warsaw newspaper. After that is done I am anxious to devote my remaining energies to a theme that has long been my special delight, the personality of Napoleon the Great."

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Stoddard. Charles Warren Stoddard, the poet, author of "South Sea Idyls," who died recently at Monterey, was supposed to have left a number of unpublished poems, several of which he read to his friends while on his sick bed. After his death, when A. M. Robertson, the publisher, and Miss Ina D. Coolbrith searched his effects they found nothing. His housekeeper at Monterey was appealed to, and she told a remarkable story, asserting that the dying poet burned all his manuscripts a day or two before his death. She said he called her to his room, ordered a fire built in the grate, and then handed her a mass of manuscript to burn. When these papers were all in ashes, he sank back satisfied. Stoddard wrote two poems just before death, "In the Shadow" and "When Life Frowns." They were extremely pessimistic, but were characterized as exquisitely poetical by those who read

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Tarkington. Up to the time of the publication of "The Gentleman from Indiana," the rewards which Booth Tarkington had reaped from literature amounted to, by his own confession, just $22.50. Of this amount, $20 had come to him in a check from Life in payment for a sketch and drawing which he submitted. The fact that the editor took pains to assure him that $13 was for the drawing and only $7 for the accompanying literary matter almost persuaded him to adopt art as a career.

Indeed, he went so far as to give up verse and prose altogether for a time. Sketch after sketch he turned out, as many as fifty in all, and on no one of them was he able to realize a cent. Thus repulsed, he once more took up the arduous task of convincing the publishers that he could write a novel which people would care to read.

On the subject of his long apprenticeship Mr. Tarkington has himself spoken, not without a little pardonable self-complacency at the tenacity of purpose which he manifested.

"I was for five years and more," he writes, "one of the rejected. as continuously and successively, I suppose, as any one who ever wrote. I sent short stories to almost all the magazines, to receive in every case the manuscript and printed slip-usually almost simultaneously, it seemed to me (they came back too soon), with my sending of them. It was a long sitting, with not the faintest hint of encouragement, and I can't say just why my years of total rejection - a quite unbroken series - did n't discourage me. I'm not sorry now that I met with no acceptance." Chicago Tribune.

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He had, after his breakfast at 8 o'clock, what he called his sacred' pipe - the first of the day. This time was absolutely his own, and he was not on any account to be interrupted or disturbed. His scheme of whatever work he had in hand was then elaborated, and he wrote then more easily than at any other time. Before breakfast he would walk on the terrace overlooking the big view. From about eleven to one he would go for a long walk, generally taking me with him, and always in later life with Karenina, the Russian wolfhound, whose picture we have been looking at. You will call to mind his wonderful flow of talk, his humorous sayings, his anecdotes, his 'rugged maxims hewn from life.' Sometimes during his walk he would be full of his work, making lines and rolling them out to me you remember what a fine and sonorous voice he had 'like the wind among the pine woods,' Carlyle called it. But his eyes seemed to be busy all the time. He was drinking in all that nature was giving him. In the midst of his speaking he would often suddenly stop and look at something, some flower, or shrub, or beautiful tree; some effect of light on the distant landscape; some change wrought by time or stress of weather; beautiful clouds or mist effects, or the long glories of the sunlight on the sea. The occasion often seemed to move his brain to some crystallization of the theme."

"For instance?" I suggested.

"Well, once when the moor above us was burned, as it was again this year, he was greatly taken with the effect of a young green bracken coming out of a blackened oak stump. He said to me:

46 6 Would not that make a a Dantesque. simile Life springing out of Death!'

"It was a habit of mind which had great results. He often put not only the spirit, but the whole salient description of a scene into a single line."

"For instance?" I asked.

"The line in The Princess':

46 4 Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn.' "That was taken from the Cataract of Gavarni in the Pyrenees. Indeed, when he

traveled with me, whenever we came to some especially fine scene or picturesque crag or such something which he thought very beautiful he always liked to sit down for a while and smoke all alone. He seemed to wish to get the very spirit of the place into him, to make it a part of himself.

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'Again, you remember these lines in 'The Eagle,' looking down from his lofty height:

"The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls,
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.'

It would be hard to put more effects into a chapter?"

"Any more instances?" I suggested. "These are more than interesting and illuminating."

He smiled. Anything that redounds to his father's honor is always a manifest delight to him. He went on :

"When I was going with my mother to look at the house at Farringford in 1853, he described an incident seen as they crossed the Solent,'One dark heron flew over the sea, backed by a daffodil sky.'

"Again the line, made on the beach at Freshwater :

:

"The shriek of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave.'

"Then again the song in 'The Princess,' 'Blow, Bugle, Blow,' came to him at his visit to Killarney in 1850, hearing the echoes among the mountains.

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Perhaps the most touching of these gleanings from nature was the origin of 'Crossing the Bar.' It is peculiarly personal and touching, for it was just after an illness when he had been near death. It was written in October of his eighty-first year. We had traveled that day from Aldworth. Something had struck him during the crossing of the Solent, and in his mind he had worked it all out. After dinner that evening he showed me the poem all written out. I said to him: That is the crown of your life's work.' He answered: 'It came in a moment.'

"He explained the pilot as 'that Divine and Unseen who is always guiding us.'” "Was his work at all intermittent ?" I

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