For instance: One day a maker of prose and verse received from the hands of the great editor a story which he had submitted to him the week before.
“If you please,” said the poet, politely, “I should like to know why you cannot use my story, so that I may be guided in the future by your preferences.”
“Certainly,” replied Mr. Bonner. “This story will not do for me because you have in it the marriage of a man with his cousin.”
“But,” protested the young author, “cousins do marry in real life very often.”
“In real life, yes,” cried the canny Scotchman; “but not in the New York Ledger!”
And it is related of this talented young maker of prose and verse, that he changed his hero and heroine from cousins to neighbors, and the very same night was seen in Pfaff’s quaffing, smoking, and jesting with his fellow-poets, and making merry over the defeat that was turned into a victory. And in the generous fashion of Bohemia he told all his comrades that “Bonner was down on cousins marrying”; and thereafter neither in song nor story did a Ledger hero ever look with anything but the eye of brotherly affection on any woman of even the most remote consanguinity.
“In real life, yes; but not in the New York Ledger!”
That gives us a taste of the milk in the cocoanut, although it does not account for the hair on the outside of the shell.
As a matter of fact, Mr. Bonner knew that a great many of his subscribers did not approve of a man marrying his own cousin when there were plenty of other folks’ cousins to be had for the asking; and so, rather than cause a moment’s annoyance to a single one of these, he forbade the practice in the columns of his paper.
I knew a number of these Ledger writers in my salad days, and have often heard them discussing their trade and the condition of the market in a way that would have lifted the hair of some of the littérateurs of the modern “delightfully-Bohemian-studio-tea” and kettledrum school.