As I was taking my leave, my attention was drawn to several large oat fields in the neighborhood of the village, and I was thereby led to suspect that Mr. McClure was turning out literature by horse-power.
“Not at all,” he said, when I questioned him on the subject. “Everything here is made by hand, but I have made a contract with a padrone for a force of Scotch dialect authors, whom I must feed, clothe, and house while they are writing for me. I expect them within a week. I shall put them at once on a serial called ‘Blithe Jockie’s Gane Awee,’ which will be my ‘feature’ for the coming year.”
ARRIVAL OF THE SCOTCH AUTHORS AT McCLURE’S LITERARY COLONY.
Yesterday morning, at a very early hour, I was awakened by an imperative summons from one of the trusty sleuths that patrol the river-front in the interest of the paper on which I am employed and informed that a band of celebrated literary men had just been landed from a tramp steamer at a Hoboken pier.
The reticence of actors, singers, authors, practical evangelists, and female temperance agitators concerning their movements renders it necessary for a great daily paper to maintain a corps of reliable spies, whose duty it is to meet every incoming steamer and see that neither Henry Irving nor Steve Brodie nor Lady Henry Somerset lands unobserved and unchronicled on our hospitable shores.
The human ferret who aroused me from my slumbers declared that the newly arrived authors were met at the pier by an active, enthusiastic little man, who instantly departed with them in the direction of the setting sun.
“And what makes you think that they were literary men?” I inquired. “Are they entered on the ship’s papers as able-bodied authors?”
“Naw,” rejoined the sleuth. “They’re beatin’ the contract labor law. I knew they was authors the minute I seen the little man that met them at the dock. He’s a regular author’s padrone. He’s got a hull town full of ’em back in Jersey some place. I’ve known him this five year or more.”