Oh! This unutterable rot spoken sometimes about writing. One is to consider the morals of the people who read, one is to please or amuse the people with these words and sentences. One lives in an age when there is much talk of service--to automobile owners, to riders on trains, to buyers of packages of food in stores. Is no one to do service to the little words, the words with which we make love, defend ourselves with lies after we have killed the friend who stole the woman we wanted--the words with which we bury our dead, comfort our friend, with which we are in the end to tell each other, if we may, all the secrets of our dreams and hopes? I am servant to the words. Are you to tell me what words I shall put aside and not write? Are you to be the master of my mood, caught from yourself perhaps as you walked in the street and I saw you when you did not see me and when you were more sweet and true in all your bearing than you have ever been before, or when alas you were more vicious and cruel. Bah! The words I have put here on this paper! But there are the clean sheets, the unwritten sheets. On them I shall write daringly, boldly and truly--to-morrow. * * * * * The writer has just come from the stationer’s, where he has got him a fresh supply of sheets. He had money with him and bought five thousand. Ah, the weight of them on the arm as he walked off along a street to his own house. Four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times he may destroy the sheet on which he has been writing and there, lying before him, will be again the fresh white surface. Makers of paper, I exclude you from all the curses I have heaped upon manufacturers when I have walked in the street breathing coal dust and smoke. I have heard your industry kills fish in rivers. Let them be killed. Fishermen are, in any event, noisy lying brutes. Last night I dreamed I had been made Pope and that I had issued a bull, excommunicating all owners of factories, consigning them to burn everlastingly in hell, but ah, I left you out of my curses, you busy makers of paper. Those who made paper at a low price and in vast quantities somewhere up in the forests of Canada, I sainted. There was one man--I invented him--named Saint John P. Belger, who furnished paper to indigent writers of prose free of charge. For virtue I put him, in my dream, almost on a level with Saint Francis of Assisi. And now the writer has got to his room and has stacked the bundles of paper on the desk where he sits to write. He goes to a window and throws it open and there is a man passing. Who is the man? The writer does not know but is tempted to throw a dish or a chair at his head, merely to show his contempt of the world. “Take that mankind! Go to Hades! Have I not five thousand sheets?”