"It 'ill soon be published. We have it on hand now, and expect to sell twenty thousand copies. The pictures will sell it alone, although, I must say, Slogger's text is very good for his subject. We are getting all the trade now. Every fellow that thinks he can scribble comes to us, and the big fish are also in our net. Murray must have been cut up pretty bad to find Gladstone leaving him and going to McMillan. It all comes of having a magazine. A publishing house that can command the columns of a well circulated magazine can print as many books as they like, and, what is better, they can sell them. Our house does the heavy flash business, and it pays well. Old 'Swoslam' is a keen blade, and is always on the lookout for a novelty. McMillan has sold, I'm told, four editions of their magazines having the Byron article. Well, old fellow, how are you (to Sullivan), and what are you doing?"
"I'm fhoine, me dharling, and me appetite is just as good as ever, but me powers of dhrinking are failing fast. As for what I'm doing, Miss Sthabber has got me to make pictures for her new novel, which she got a hundred and fifty pounds for in the 'Thames Mag.,' and now she is going to publish it in book form. It's a nice title she has for it, 'The Red Divil of the Yallow Mountin; or, the Ghost of the Place de Greve.' I sometimes think the woman is going crazy whin she sinds for me in the mornin' to talk to her about her new books down Brompton way, where she lives. I generally find her in bed with a decanther of brandy, a pot of coffee, and a square box of cigarettes by her bedside on a table. 'Soolivan,' said she, 'I want two Convent scenes in the sixth chapter; a rocky pass, with a skeleton standing in the middle of the gap, his grisly arms outstretched, for the ninth chapter; and in the fifteenth chapter you must give me a powerful tableoo where the chief butler is discovered in the room off the banquetting hall poisoning his misthresses's wine.
"'For the details I'll trust to your powerful Irish imagination; and now, Soolivan, you low blackguard, turn your back and help yourself to the brandy while I'm putting on me wrapper, as I don't wan't you to be making fancy pictures of 'Vanus going to the Bath,' or any such gammon as that, for pot-houses, with the great female London novelist—I believe that's what they call me, isn't it, Soolivan?—as an original.' Indade, I think that Miss Sthabber is more nor half mad, but I must say that she is the divil at plots and incidents, and she drinks excellent brandy."
THE SHORT-HAND REPORTER.
"Stabber is a clever woman," said Cockerell, the head clerk. "Whackem & Co., Paternoster Row, sold thirty-two thousand copies of her 'Blue-Eyed Demon' in three months, and she refused £950 for it from an Edinburgh house, so Whackem must have given her more. By the way, do any of your fellows know the name of this man who has written the last new novel 'Girded with Steel?' I fancy he must be one of your newspaper fellows, because he has a lot of stuff in it about 'leader writing,' 'my note-book,' 'two columns is more than earthquake should be allowed in a newspaper,' and there are, besides, the details of editorial life which an outsider could not know. Who is he?"
"Oh, he's a young reporter on the Omniverous Clam, but I could not give his name on a pint of honor," said Fitz. "He's a clever chap, though, and will make his way. He's only been two years in the professhion, and he's the best short-hand man on the Clam now, so maybe you know who I mean now."
"It's Billingsgate," said one.
"No, it's Gravelly," said another.
"Boys, ye are not right; it's Goby, and he's five hundred and fifty pounds the betther of it, which is a nice little lump for a reporther who gets five guineas a week, and has to work like a horse for that in the session," said Fitzgerald.
"Reporthers have harder work now then they had whin I first went in the Gallery," said old Dawson. "Me father, as yez know, boys, was a reporther before me; and I might say it runs in the family. Ah! thim were good times, boys, when the ould man did his short-hand wurruk. He knew all the great reporthers of the day; and fine fellows they were, too. There was William Radcliffe, the husband of the woman who wrote all the bloodthirsty novels. Radcliffe was a mimry reporther, and he'd go to the House and sit the debates out, and nivir take a note at all, at all. Then he'd go to the office and dictate two different articles at a time to the juniors who took it all down, and out it came, sphick-and-sphan, in the morning, without a flaw.