“You’re lucky to have such a talent,” put in Phil at last.
“Lucky! Talent!” exclaimed Langford.
“I always understood literature was a lucrative pursuit.”
“Pursuit,––yes;––but lucrative! Ye gods!
“You see, Ralston, I suffer with my thoughts until I relieve myself by getting them down as best I can on 61 paper, then I bury them in my trunk along with their elder brothers. I know I ought to burn them, but I haven’t the heart to murder my children born in such travail. Some day, however, it will have to be done, otherwise they’ll crowd their father-mother out of house and home.”
“Don’t you try to market your work?”
“I did once––many times once––but they would have none of my high-faluting flights, although as Captain Mayne Plunkett, the writer of penny dreadfuls for the consumption of England’s budding pirates and cowpunchers, I am not without a following, and I have a steady contract for one per month at fifty dollars straight. To a New York girls’ journal, I am not unkindly thought of as Aunt Christina in the Replies to the Love Lorn column,––five dollars per––.”
He laughed reflectively.
“But don’t you work?” asked Phil innocently.
“Work! Lord, isn’t that work a-plenty?”