"Look here, Father Dan," said he, "I'm not in much humor for joking. Any priest that would attempt to write a book nowadays should have the spirit of the martyrs, who stepped onto the sands in the Coliseum and saw the brutal Romans in the auditorium and wild beasts in the cages beneath!"
"Well, my dear boy," I replied, "you will write the book; but for goodness' sake write it in your present humor, before the fires die down."
He laughed.
"Write a book? What in the world should I write about? The world is deluged and drowned by books. And if I wrote it, who could or would publish it? Imagine me hawking around a wretched manuscript from publisher to publisher, until it was tattered, yellow, and undecipherable. Why, the big London fellows accept only ten MSS. out of five hundred on the average, and you know I cannot publish at my own risk."
"Who the mischief spoke about publishing?" I replied, trying to keep up the flame; "I only asked you to write. Write, write, write, and leave the publishing to God."
"And what am I to write about? Every subject under the sun is threshed out and threadbare, from the origin of ideas down to the microbe of typhoid fever. Not at all; the world is grown too wise for books; we must devise something else."
"It is not many days ago," I replied, "since I heard you lament the awful and culpable defects in our popular Catholic literature. Hadn't you to fall back upon that barbarous book to enlighten Ormsby on the existence of his immortal soul?"
"Barbarous? I wish to heaven that I could write anything half as good. But, as you see, there are whole fields of literature yet untrodden by us, but where heretics and others are reaping rich harvests. Yet, who would dare make the attempt? Don't you know that the ablest professors in your own time in Maynooth never ventured into print? They dreaded the chance shots from behind the hedge from the barrels of those masked banditti, called 'critics.'"
"Dear me, how you do run on! One would think you had the MS. cut and dry in your pocket, you talk so glibly about publishers and critics. Can't you write the book first and then take circumstances as they occur?"
"Well, go on, suggest a subject, sir."