most of his letters at dictation, and certainly earned my money. My monthly articles in the magazine were on such subjects as Christmas in England, Life at a Moravian School, The Black Forest, Travel in the Alps--anything that my limited experience enabled me to describe at first-hand, and on the whole the old gentleman seemed satisfied. The description of the children's pictures, however, always made him chuckle, though he never said why, and I wrote dozens of these a day, describing the picture of "King Canute and the Sea," "Elijah in a Chariot of Fire," "A Child Blowing Bubbles," "The Wood-boring Beetle," etc. etc.
He would dictate some of his articles of travel to me, and I would take them down in shorthand, and he often made such grotesque mistakes in facts that I quietly corrected these as I wrote, and when I read out the sentence to him he would notice the alteration and look at me over his spectacles and say:
"Thank you. Yes, I was wrong there. The fact is, I have so many articles to write that I compose two at a time in my mind, and they get muddled up. An editor should always be accurate, and Methodist readers are cranky and hard to please." He was a Methodist parson himself, which did not prevent him saying exactly what he thought. He lunched off dates and bananas, which he kept in a bag beside his desk, and that same desk was in such disorder that he never could find what he wanted, and I was not surprised to learn that, before I came, the printers got the wrong papers, and that many of the children's pictures got descriptions underneath that did not belong to them--for instance, a boy blowing a bubble was published over a few lines describing the habits of snakes, "as seen in our illustration," and so forth.
I got on so well with the little Methodist that he wanted to come to the evening French classes I was giving at fifty cents a lesson to some of the clerks in the insurance office, and to bring his daughter with him.
He said a little more knowledge of French would be very
