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READERS

YMPATHETICALLY I judge a sleepy reader.

I do not laugh at scars, for I have felt a wound. It is the chief problem of an author, nevertheless, that he find all warrantable and honest means to keep his drowsy client awake. If he nods, of what use is his fine instruction, the charm of words, the hint toward holy living? A brain all clogged with sleep is as a vessel filled that declines addition. It is the difficulty of the profession that an author can hope for perusal only at night when his readers have spent themselves on the duties of the day. A lazy slattern may take him up at noon, but to such I do not address myself. On rare holidays at best may he hope that wor

thier readers will fetch his volume down when the wakeful sun is up and the brain unjaded.

And so I have observed that there comes an hour of evening-let us hazard nine o'clock—when unhappily the first vigor of dinner has spent itself and the brain has not led up the gay enforcement of the night against attack. In nine o'clock I strike but on an average. Housewives inclined to a dumpy life, strict men of business who run all day from colloquy to conference, tell me that theirs is eight o'clock when first the evening paper has been laid away. And this is the hour when dull books seem duller still. The laborious fellows who composed them could find then no comfort for their vanity at any glance within the room, and it is well in charity to keep the curtains down.

But whatever precisely is the hour, the time comes surely in the early evening that is as zero to a sleepy reader. Many of them, cowards at heart, yield to it. They steal softly to the lamp. They turn it out. They unbutton themselves while they are still upon the stairs. Their collar is off at the landing. The shirt is lifted from the belt in the upper hall. Boots are kicked aside. In the bedroom a general explosion scatters them all about.

And yet, if they were of sterner metal, they could endure this zero hour and by pure vigor of the will slip through the shallows, and so persist to midnight which is a more civilized time for bed. Of this power of will I am persuaded. A lady of my acquaintance has told me that her bad time is half-past eight. Even before the striking of the clock she feels its nearness and a consuming lassitude seizes her. Regularly then she

moves a chair, she brushes up the hearth; and so, the critical moment passed, she is good for another dozen chapters of even a stupid novel.

I offer a hint to publishers how they may spread their sale of books. They should apply their advertising to the advantage of an earlier dinner and a longer evening. Let them start a national campaign to pronounce a man no better than a sluggard who kicks aside his boots when the hour is young. Or, more subtly, they might combine with the dispensers of indigestible foods that tend to wakefulness, and I can fancy their interest pooled with the coffee-growers. Is it too gross that I mention the heavier brands of pie and their effect on the midnight perusal of a masterpiece?

But an author must take things as they are, before this reformation shall have been accomplished, and so conduct the method of his writing that his sharpest pages fall mid-channel in the evening when temptation bedward is at the top. Any book, no matter how stupid, can get its first chapter read; and a second, for there still is hope for a better turning. But the danger of abandonment, as in marriage, comes when half is done. Hope then is dulled by repeated disappointment, the scribbler's bad habits seem confirmed. In my own library I have examined a dozen books to see at what point my own strength gave out, as is indicated by uncut leaves. And I find that the crucial pages are at the middle. If one can pass that shallow, stubbornness will somehow get the reader through.

Ships are wrecked upon a coast, but a vessel of words founders most often in mid-ocean where plots are foggy.

And so, now halfway in my book whose scattered leaves all marked with interlineation muss my desk, I am aware that it is only by a mighty effort that I can still further hold the reader inside his boots.

I must do something at once by way of advice to him. My dear sir, will you please take a turn around Punch the fire! Sniff the cold night air at the open window! In God's name push the porch furniture about! Do the awnings need tinkering?

Now's the time!

Or, if you decline this display of energy, a remedy must fall to me. Something startling I must havearresting, shocking, explosive! This is the place, if ever, where my plot must sound a gong. Ah. .

I suck my pen. Those four dots stand for prolonged thought. Ah. . . . Is there nothing exciting to cast upon my pale adventures? If only, at this point, a highwayman could have assailed us! If a motor might have bumped us from the rear! I would choose Bill or Beezer rather than myself, for I am sensitive to pain. A shriek! A broken leg! Death and damnation! Can I find no lady to be rescued from the sea? No scandal to spice my page, or peep of wantonness as is the fashion of novelists?

Once again I start my chapter, and now in bolder vein. I shall force my publisher—I shall at least try to force my publisher to a four-inch headline to top the page in the manner of an evening paper when the news is raw.

Anger inflames me at the slight

CHAPTER XVII

JULIA FLOAY.

THREE TRAVELERS ESCAPE MURDER!

A Dangerous Experience in a Country Hotel

T is a petty tenant that holds the longest lease

I

upon the memory. On this snowy winter morning,

as I write of a departed August-for books of summer are always written in a muffler-there rises in my recollection of our leisured days of English travel how we were locked in our room at the White Hart Inn and could be released only when the chambermaid put her shoulder to the panel.

Let me, for variety, cast the occasion in a play!

The scene is the inn at Lewes, two flights up. The time is eight o'clock in the morning. The persons of the drama are two young gentlemen in pyjamas, for this is a bedroom farce with the aforementioned chambermaid for triangle. One of these gentlemen lies snoring in a fitful gust, the other reaches for his stockings. 1st Y. G. Beezer!

2nd Y. G. Kkaaww!

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