over-worked, nervous and semi-paralytic, she nursed the rosy hope that to-morrow, or at the very latest, the day after to-morrow, the reward of all her self-devotion would come to her in the form of a liberal copyright statement from her long-suffering and charitable publisher. "Out in the West they have a disease called milk-sickness, an awful malady, of which everybody stands in deadly terror, but which nobody has ever seen. If you set out to find a case of milk-sickness it is like following a _will-o'-the-wisp_, it is always just a little way farther on, over in the next settlement; you never find it. The really successful author in America is, like the milk-sickness, never visible, except on the remote horizon. You hear much of him, but you never have the pleasure of shaking his cunning right hand. The fact is, he is a myth. On the other hand, however, the American cities are full of successful publishers who have become millionaires upon the profits of books which have starved their authors. Of course this appears to be a paradox, but I suppose that it can be explained by the rule of profit and loss. The author's loss is the publisher's profit." The foregoing is, in substance, the opening part of an address delivered by Ferris before the assembled guests of Hotel Helicon. Mrs. Nancy Jones Black presided at the meeting; indeed she always presided at meetings. On this occasion, which was informal and impromptu, Ferris was in excellent mood for speaking, as he just had been notified by a letter from Dunkirk & Co. that he was expected to pay in advance for the plates of his new romance, _A Mysterious Missive_, and that a personal check would not be accepted--a draft on New York must be sent forthwith. Although Ferris was a thoroughly good fellow, who cared nothing for money as money, this demand for a sum the half of which he could not command if his life were at stake, hit him like a bullet-stroke. A chance to talk off the soreness of the wound was accepted with avidity. He felt guilty of a meanness, it is true, in thus stirring up old troubles and opening afresh ancient hurts in the breasts of his listening friends; but the relief to him was so great that he could not forego it. "The American publisher," he went on, "proclaims himself a fraud by demanding of the author a contract which places the author's business wholly in the control of the publisher. I take it that publishers are just as honest and just as dishonest, as any other class of respectable men. You know and I know, that, as a rule, the man who trusts his business entirely to others will, in the long run, be robbed. Administrators of estates rob the heirs, in two-thirds of the instances, as every probate lawyer well knows. Every merchant has to treat his clerks and salesmen as if they were thieves, or if he do not they will become thieves. The government has to appoint bank examiners to watch the bankers, and yet they steal. The Indian agents steal from the government.