Louis Maunders was writing an anonymous novel, and a large circle of friends and acquaintances expected it to make a big hit. Louis Maunders was so modest that he distrusted his own opinion, and was glad to find his friends sharing it in this matter. It strengthened him. He carried the manuscript unostentatiously about in a long brief bag, while the book was writing, and worked at it during all his spare moments. Even in omnibuses he was to be seen scribbling hard with a stylus, and neglecting to attend to the conductor. The plot of the story was sad and heartrending, for Louis was only twenty-one. Louis refused to give those roseate pictures of life which the conventional novelist turns out to please the public. He objected to "happy endings." In real life, he said, no story ends happily; for the end of everybody's story is Death. In this book he said some bitter things about Life which it would have winced to hear, had it been alive. As for Death, he doubted whether it was worth dying. Towards Nature he took a tone of haughty superiority, and expressed himself disrespectfully on the subject of Fate. He mocked at it through the lips of his hero, and altogether seemed qualifying for the liver complaint, which is the Prometheus myth done into modern English. He taught that the only Peace for man lies in snapping the fingers at Fortune, taking her buffets and her favours with equal contempt, and generally teaching her to know her place. The soul of the Philosopher, he said, would stand grinning cynically though the planetary system were sold off by auction. These lessons were taught with great tragic power in Maunders' novel, and he was looking forward to the time when it should be in print, and on all the carpets of conversation. He was extremely gratified to find his friends thinking so well of its prospects, for it was pleasing to him to discover that he had chosen his circle so well, and had such intelligent friends. It did not seem to him at all unlikely that he would make his fortune with this novel; and he hurried on with it, till the masterpiece needed only a few final touches and a few last insults to Fate. Then he left the bag in a hansom cab. When he remembered his forgetfulness, he was distracted. He raved like a maniac—and like a maniac did not even write his ravings down for after use. He applied at Scotland Yard, but the superintendent said that drivers brought there only articles of value. He sent paragraphs to the papers, asking even of the Echo where his lost novel was. But the Echo answered not. Several spiteful papers insinuated that he was a liar, and a high-class comic paper went out of its way to make a joke, and to call his book "The Mystery of a Hansom Cab." The annoying part of the business was that after getting all this gratuitous advertisement, in itself enough to sell two editions, the book still refused to come up for publication. Maunders was too heart-broken to write another. For months he went about, a changed being. He had put the whole of himself into that book, and it was lost. He mourned for the departed manuscript, and generously extolled its virtues. For years he remained faithful to its memory; and its pages were made less dry with his tears. But the most intemperate grief wears itself out at last; and after a few years of melancholy, Maunders rallied and became a critic.

THE GREAT CRITIC.

As a critic he set in with great severity, and by carefully refraining from doing anything himself, gained a great reputation far and wide. In due course he joined the staff of the AcadÆum, where his signed contributions came to be looked for with profound respect by the public and with fear and trembling by authors. For Maunders' criticism was so very superior, even for the AcadÆum, of which the trade motto was "Stop here for Criticism—superior to anything in the literary market." Maunders flayed and excoriated Marsyas till the world accepted him as Apollo.

What Maunders was most down upon was novel-writing. Not having to follow them himself, he had high ideals of art; and woe to the unfortunate author who thought he had literary and artistic instinct when he had only pen and paper. Maunders was especially severe upon the novels of young authors, with their affected style and jejune ideas. Perhaps the most brilliant criticism he ever wrote was a merciless dissection of a book of this sort, reeking with the insincerity and crudity of youth, full of accumulated ignorance of life, and brazening it out by flashy cynicism.

A week after this notice appeared, his oldest and dearest friend called upon him and asked him for an explanation.

"What do you mean?" said Maunders.

"When I read your slashing notice of 'A Fingersnap for Fate,' I at once got the book."

"What! After I had disembowelled it; after I had shown it was a stale sausage stuffed with old and putrid ideas?"

"Well, to tell the truth," said his friend, a little crestfallen at having to confess, "I always get the books you pitch into. So do lots of people. We are only plain, ordinary, homespun people, you know; so we feel sure that whatever you praise will be too superior for us, while what you condemn will suit us to a t. That is why the great public studies and respects your criticisms. You are our literary pastor and monitor. Your condemnation is our guide-post, and your praise is our Index Expurgatorius. But for you we should be lost in the wilderness of new books."

"And this is all the result of my years of laborious criticism," fumed the AcadÆum critic. "Proceed, sir."

"Well, what I came to say was, that if my memory does not play me a trick after all these years, 'A Fingersnap for Fate' is your long-lost novel."

"What!" shrieked the great critic; "my long-lost child! Impossible."

"Yes," persisted his oldest and dearest friend. "I recognised it by the strawberry mark in Cap. II., where the hero compares the younger generation to fresh strawberries smothered in stale cream. I remember your reading it to me!"

"Heavens! The whole thing comes back to me," cried the critic. "Now I know why I damned it so unmercifully for plagiarism! All the while I was reading it, there was a strange, haunting sense of familiarity."

"But, surely you will expose the thief!"

"How can I? It would mean confessing that I wrote the book myself. That I slated it savagely, is nothing. That will pass as a good joke, if not a piece of rare modesty. But confess myself the author of such a wretched failure!"

"Excuse me," said his friend. "It is not a failure. It is a very popular success. It is selling like wildfire. Excuse the inaccurate simile; but you know what I mean. Your notice has sent the sale up tremendously. Ever since your notice appeared, the printing presses have been going day and night and are utterly unable to cope with the demand. Oh, you must not let a rogue make a fortune out of you like this. That would be too sinful."

So the great critic sought out the thief. And they divided the profits. And then the thief, who was a fool as well as a rogue, wrote another book—all out of his own head this time. And the critic slated it. And they divided the profits.