he was doing no more than was right. She brought him the
anti-tobacco remedy, purchased out of her glove money, and in a few days forgot
all about it.
    His machine-made storiettes, though he hated them and derided them, were
successful. By means of them he redeemed all his pledges, paid most of his
bills, and bought a new set of tires for his wheel. The storiettes at least kept
the pot a-boiling and gave him time for ambitious work; while the one thing that
upheld him was the forty dollars he had received from The White Mouse. He
anchored his faith to that, and was confident that the really first-class
magazines would pay an unknown writer at least an equal rate, if not a better
one. But the thing was, how to get into the first-class magazines. His best
stories, essays, and poems went begging among them, and yet, each month, he read
reams of dull, prosy, inartistic stuff between all their various covers. If only
one editor, he sometimes thought, would descend from his high seat of pride to
write me one cheering line! No matter if my work is unusual, no matter if it is
unfit, for prudential reasons, for their pages, surely there must be some sparks
in it, somewhere, a few, to warm them to some sort of appreciation. And
thereupon he would get out one or another of his manuscripts, such as
»Adventure,« and read it over and over in a vain attempt to vindicate the
editorial silence.
    As the sweet California spring came on, his period of plenty came to an end.
For several weeks he had been worried by a strange silence on the part of the
newspaper storiette syndicate. Then, one day, came back to him through the mail
ten of his immaculate machine-made storiettes. They were accompanied by a brief
letter to the effect that the syndicate was overstocked, and that some months
would elapse before it would be in the market again for manuscripts. Martin had
even been extravagant on the strength of those ten storiettes. Toward the last
the syndicate had been paying him five dollars each for them and accepting every
one he sent. So he had looked upon the ten as good as sold, and he had lived
accordingly, on a basis of fifty dollars in the bank. So it was that he entered
abruptly upon a lean period, wherein he continued selling his earlier efforts to
publications that would not pay and submitting his later work to magazines that
would not buy. Also, he resumed his