chase after an idea that has to be tracked through a forest of pot-hooks thick-set with an underbrush of erasures and interlineations.
Dear Mr. Editor, I that speak to you have sent, not to you, sir, but to that other editor who returned it, as I am sure you will not,—I have sent, I say, just such manuscript as editors call for, fair, clean, written on one side, not with a pencil, but with a good gold pen, stamps enclosed for return if declined; the whole thing "neat, but not gaudy, as the monkey said" on the memorable occasion "when he painted his tail sky-blue."
Now, good Mr. Editor, what do you suppose the man to whom I sent that model manuscript did with it? Why, sir, he went straight through it with a blue pencil,—put Cain's mark on paragraph after paragraph, as if he intended to use what he did not obliterate. I suppose that was what he calls editing; and I do not wonder that editors complain of hard work. Then he turned over one of the leaves, and on the blank side, where he doesn't want contributors to write, he wrote a note to me in blue pencil (it made me blue enough to read it) giving his reasons for not using my article. Then he added his "regrets." He is the same editor who insists on my writing "only on one side of the paper" What does he do that for? Is it to enable him to make my article unfit to send to another editor by scattering his blue pot-hooks on the side that he told me to leave blank? Do editors realize, when an article comes to them, that if they don't want it somebody else may? Who would send out an article with the marks of a former refusal spread over it, to try its chances with another editor? No, sir: that article must be recopied before it can be sent out again.
While the contributor is making the second copy, he calls to mind the story of the parrot that was left in a minister's family by its owner while he went to Europe. The owner of the bird returned. He took his parrot home. Every time the door-bell rang, that bird would exclaim, " D—n that book-agent!" What do you suppose a contributor says when his neat manuscript comes back, not only rejected, but black with his own ink and blue with the editor's pencil-marks? I know very well what I say.
There are editors who accept an article, name the price they will pay for it, keep it a couple of years, and then, like a girl who says "yes" when you ask her and "no" when the wedding-day comes, send it back when it is too old for anything but your own waste-basket. Does this happen often? No, but it does sometimes.
I have known a religious editor, or rather the editor of a religious paper, to take an article offered "at your usual rates," and publish it, but fail to remit, and, when gently reminded that there should be a quid pro quo, maintain a silence that was not golden but was brassy. And he has not paid for it yet. I hope he will see this article, be pricked in his heart, and send me his "usual rates" for stolen property, with about five years' interest at ten per cent.
In the main, I admire the editor. He means to be fair. Rut when he cannot use an article, if he only would take a slip of paper and write out his views on that, instead of defacing a manuscript that is "written in a neat, legible hand, on one side of the paper," if he would only refrain from making such manuscript unfit to send to some other editor, I should feel that rejection is not such a very dismal matter after all.
