He departed to business. At all the newspaper-shops, at all the bookstalls, he saw the placards of morning newspapers with lines conceived thus: AMUSING INCIDENT AT THE ALHAMBRA. A NOVELIST'S ADVENTURE. VANISHING AUTHOR AT A MUSIC-HALL. A NOVELIST IN A BOX. CHAPTER XVIII HIS JACK-HORNERISM That autumn the Chancelleries of Europe happened to be rather less egotistic than usual, and the English and American publics, seeing no war-cloud on the horizon, were enabled to give the whole of their attention to the balloon sent up into the sky by Mr. Onions Winter. They stared to some purpose. There are some books which succeed before they are published, and the commercial travellers of Mr. Onions Winter reported unhesitatingly that _A Question of Cubits_ was such a book. The libraries and the booksellers were alike graciously interested in the rumour of its advent. It was universally considered a 'safe' novel; it was the sort of novel that the honest provincial bookseller reads himself for his own pleasure and recommends to his customers with a peculiar and special smile of sincerity as being not only 'good,' but '_really_ good.' People mentioned it with casual anticipatory remarks who had never previously been known to mention any novel later than _John Halifax Gentleman_. This and other similar pleasing phenomena were, of course, due in part to the mercantile sagacity of Mr. Onions Winter. For during a considerable period the Anglo-Saxon race was not permitted to forget for a single day that at a given moment the balloon would burst and rain down copies of _A Question of Cubits_ upon a thirsty earth. _A Question of Cubits_ became the universal question, the question of questions, transcending in its insistence the liver question, the soap question, the Encyclopaedia question, the whisky question, the cigarette question, the patent food question, the bicycle tyre question, and even the formidable uric acid question. Another powerful factor in the case was undoubtedly the lengthy paragraph concerning Henry's adventure at the Alhambra. That paragraph, having crystallized itself into a fixed form under the title 'A Novelist in a Box,' had started on a journey round the press of the entire world, and was making a pace which would have left Jules Verne's hero out of sight in twenty-four hours. No editor could deny his hospitality to it. From the New York dailies it travelled via the _Chicago Inter-Ocean_ to the _Montreal Star_, and thence back again with the rapidity of light by way of the _Boston Transcript_, the _Philadelphia Ledger_, and the _Washington Post_, down to the _New Orleans Picayune_. Another day, and it was in the _San Francisco Call_, and soon afterwards it had reached _La Prensa_ at Buenos Ayres. It then disappeared for a period amid the Pacific Isles, and was next heard of in the _Sydney Bulletin_, the _Brisbane Courier_ and the _Melbourne Argus_. A moment, and it blazed in the _North China Herald_, and was