"'Unwritten Poems,' eh?" said Tom, to whom the title seemed curious.
"Yes," said the Bellows. "The book had three hundred pages, all nicely bound—twenty-six lines to a page—and each beginning with a capital letter, just as poetry should. Then, so as to be quite fair to all the letters, I began with A and went right straight through the alphabet to Z."
"But the poems?" demanded Tom.
"They were unwritten just as the title said," returned the Bellows. "You see that left everything to the imagination, which is a great thing in poetry."
"Didn't people complain?" Tom asked.
"Everybody did," replied the Bellows, "but that was just what I wanted. I agreed to answer every complaint accompanied by ten cents in postage stamps. Eight million complaints alone brought me in $480,000 over and above all expenses, which were four cents per complaint."
"But what was your answer?" demanded Tom.
"I merely told them that my book stood upon its own merits, and that if they didn't like my unwritten poems they could write some of their own on the blank pages of the book. It was a perfectly fair proposition," the Bellows replied.
"I think I like written poetry best, though," said Tom.
"That's entirely a matter of taste," said the Bellows, "and I shan't find fault with you for that. The only thing is that Unwritten Poems are apt to have fewer faults than the written ones, and every great poet will tell you that nobody ever detected any mistakes in his poems until he had put them down on paper. If he had left them unwritten nobody would ever have known how bad they were."