"Tolstoi is the greatest fraud of the nineteenth century," said Peck. "That shoe-making pretence of his is about on a par with his genius in genuineness and sincerity. His novels are great chunks of raw filth, rank, garlic garnished and hideous. We touch them only because the French critics have called them savory. If the _Revue de Deux Mondes_ should praise a Turkish novel we could not wait to read it before we joined in. Tolstoi is remarkable for two things: his coarseness and his vulgar disregard of decency and truth. His life and his writings are alike crammed with absurdities and contradictory puerilities which would be laughable but for their evil tendencies." "But, my dear sir, how then do you account for the many editions of Tolstoi's books?" inquired the historian, R. Hobbs Lucas. "Just as I account for the editions of Cowper and Montgomery and Wordsworth and even Shakespeare," responded Peck. "You put a ten per cent. author's royalty on all those dear classics and see how soon the publishers will quit uttering them! If Tolstoi's Russian raw meat stories were put upon the market in a fair competition with American novels the latter would beat them all hollow in selling." "Oh, we ought to have international copyright," plaintively exclaimed a dozen voices, and so the conversation ended. Strangely enough, each one of the company in growing silent did so in order to weigh certain suggestions arising out of Peck's assertions. It was as if a score of semi-annual statements of copyright accounts were fluttering in the breeze, and it was as if a score of wistful voices had whispered: "How in the world do publishers grow rich when the books they publish never sell?" Perhaps Gaspard Dufour should be mentioned as appearing to have little sympathy with Peck's theory or with the inward mutterings it had engendered in the case of the rest of the company. If there was any change in Dufour's face it was expressed in a smile of intense self-satisfaction. XI. It was, of course, not long that the newspapers of our wide-awake country were kept from giving their readers very picturesque glimpses of what was going on among the dwellers on Mt. Boab. The humorists of the press, those charming fellows whose work is so enjoyable when performed upon one's neighbor and so excruciating when turned against oneself, saw the vulnerable points of the situation and let go a broadside of ridicule that reverberated from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It became a matter of daily amusement among the inmates of Hotel Helicon to come together in little groups and discuss these humorous missiles fired upon them from California, Texas, Arkansas and Wisconsin, from Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Oil-City, Detroit and--, but from everywhere, indeed.