"Dreadful!" said the landlady, forgetting to be sarcastic.
"What happened?" asked the School-master.
"He was bounced, of course, without a cent of pay, and the company failed the[Pg 77] next week, so he couldn't make anything by suing for what they owed him."
"Mighty hard luck," said the Bibliomaniac.
"Very; but there was one bright side to the case," observed the Idiot. "He managed to sell both versions of the quatrain afterwards for five dollars. He sold the original one to a religious weekly for a dollar, and got four dollars for the other one from a comic paper. Then he wrote an anecdote about the whole thing for a Sunday newspaper, and got three dollars more out of it."
"And what is your friend doing now?" asked the Doctor.
"Oh, he's making a mint of money now, but no name."
"In literature?"
"Yes. He writes advertisements on salary," returned the Idiot. "He is writing now a recommendation of tooth-powder in Indian dialect."
"Why didn't he try writing an epic?" said the Bibliomaniac.