know him well, when he has that tingling for technique in his fingers, not Aphrodite herself, new risen from the waves, could tempt him into any world where craft was not lord and king. So it happened that their real love affair never began until one morning when "Landy" had to go down to the wharf to write up a whaleback, and "Blix" went along, and an old sailor told them a story and "Blix" recognized the literary possibilities of it, and they had lunch in a Chinese restaurant, and "Landy" because he was a newspaper man and it was the end of the week, didn't have any change about his clothes, and "Blix" had to pay the bill. And it was in that green old tea house that "Landy" read "Blix" one of his favorite yarns by Kipling, and she in a calm, off-handed way, recognized one of the fine, technical points in it, and "Landy" almost went to pieces for joy of her doing it. That scene in the Chinese restaurant is one of the prettiest bits of color you'll find to rest your eyes upon, and mighty good writing it is. I wonder, though if when Mr. Norris adroitly mentioned the "clack and snarl" of the banjo "Landy" played, he remembered the "silver snarling trumpets" of Keats? After that, things went on as such things will, and "Blix" quit the society racket and went to queer places with "Landy," and got interested in his work, and she broke him of wearing red neckties and playing poker, and she made him work, she did, for she grew to realize how much that meant to him, and she jacked him up when he didn't work, and she suggested an ending for one of his stories that was better than his own; just this big, splendid girl, who had never gone to college to learn how to write novels. And so how, in the name of goodness, could he help loving her? So one morning down by the Pacific, with "Blix" and "The Seven Seas," it all came over "Landy," that "living was better than reading and life was better than literature." And so it is; once, and only once, for each of us; and that is the tune that sings and sings through one's head when one puts the book away. _The Courier_, January 13, 1900 AN HEIR APPARENT. Last winter a young Californian, Mr. Frank Norris, published a novel with the unpretentious title, "McTeague: a Story of San Francisco." It was a book that could not be ignored nor dismissed with a word. There was something very unusual about it, about its solidity and mass, the thoroughness and firmness of texture, and it came down like a blow from a sledge hammer among the slighter and more sprightly performances of the hour.