In this system the character of the material is first indicated, as Pay of Soldiers. If there is a title it follows in quotation marks. Where the title suggests the character of the material sufficiently, the title comes first, in "quotes." Then follows the letter under which the article is filed, and the number of the file. Suppose it is desired to find out what soldiers of the United States' Army are paid for their services: File No. 2 is removed from the shelf, opened at letter "Y" and the information secured under title beginning, "Young Man—."
As a saver of time, and a guard against annoyance when fancies are running free, Edwards has found his card-index system for clippings almost ideal.
A friend of Edwards' is what the comic papers call a "jokesmith." Recently he concocted the following:
"You must be doing well," said Jones the merchant to Quill the writer, meeting him in front of his house. "You seem to be always busy, and you look prosperous."
"So I am, Jones," answered Quill, "busy and prosperous. Come into the basement with me and I'll show you the secret of my prosperity."
They descended into the basement and Quill rang up the curtain on a ragman weighing three big bags of rejection slips.
"My stories all come back," confessed Quill, triumphantly, "and I get three cents a pound for the rejection slips that come with them."
This, of course, was not much of a joke, but the perpetrator sent it to Judge. Judge sent it back with about twenty blank rejection slips inclosed by a rubber band. On the top slip was written: "Here are some more.—Ed. Judge."
[X.]
THE WOLF
AT THE DOOR
Perhaps very few men in this life escape a period as black and dispiriting as was the year 1897 for Edwards. If not in one way, then in another, it is the fate of a man to be chastened and subdued so thoroughly, at least once in his career, that a livid remembrance of it remains always with him. Edwards has always been an optimist, but those blows of circumstance of the year 1897 found many weak places in the armor of his philosophy.
In tangling and untangling the threads of a story plot Edwards had become tolerably proficient, but in straightening out the snarls Fate had made in his own life he was crushed with a feeling of abject helplessness. There is a vast difference, it seems, in dealing with the complications of others and those that beset ourselves. The impersonal attitude makes for keener analysis and wiser judgment.