“‘No; suppose my friend reads it—you have enough of that to do all day.’
“Just as I expected, the reader’s personality again transformed everything. The long-winded descriptions under the magic of his voice seemed too short, while every conversation thought dull before appeared to be illumined by a hidden meaning tucked away between the lines.
“When the editor left at midnight the coffin was in his pocket. Two days later the book department forwarded a contract with a check for five hundred dollars as advance royalties.
“There was no holding my friend down to earth after that. His joy and pride in that shambling, God-forsaken, worthless plodder whom he had despised for years was overwhelming. He was like a boy out of school. Stories which he had forgotten were pulled out of the past and given with a humor and point that dazzled every one around my study fire. Personal reminiscences of politicians he had known, and campaigns he had directed from his editorial chair, were told in a way that made them live in our memories ever after. Never had any of my friends met so delightful and cultivated a man.
“The next day he went back to his home town carrying his enthusiasm with him.
“In two months the usual book notices began to crop out in the papers—all written in the publisher’s establishment—a fact which he must have known, but which, from his enthusiastic letters, I saw he had overlooked. His own village papers reprinted the notices with editorial comments of their own—‘Our distinguished fellow-citizen,’ etc.—that sort of thing.
“These were also forwarded to me by mail with renewed thanks for the service I had done him—he, the ‘modern Lazarus snatched from an early grave.’ When a bona fide reviewer noticed the book at all, it was in half a dozen lines, with allusions to the amateurishness of the effort—‘his first and, it is hoped, his last,’ one critic was brutal enough to add. When one of these reached him, it was dismissed with a smile. He knew what he had done, and so would the world once the book got out among the people.
“Then the first six months’ account was mailed him. The royalty sales had not reached one-half of the first payment!
“He sat—so his brother told me afterward—with the firm’s letter in his hand, and for an hour never opened his lips. That afternoon he went to bed; in three months he was dead! It had broken his heart.
“I, too, sat with a paper in my hand—his brother’s telegram. Had I done right or wrong? I am still wondering and I have not yet solved the question. Had I never crossed his path and had he kept on in his editor’s chair, giving out short, crisp comments on the life of the day, he would, no doubt, be alive and earning a fair support. I had attempted the impossible and failed. The square peg in the round hole had split the plank!”