"I am a member of the staff of 'Willard's Magazine,'" explained Utterly. "Some weeks ago I looked carefully over the old files with a view to making a comparison of the shorter fiction of to-day with that which was being written twenty-five years or more ago. Ours to-day is vastly superior." Suddenly Utterly's words came in a flood. He grew ardent and excited. "We are beginning to learn from the French and Russians. We are learning the beauty of the lowly, even of the degraded. We are learning to look at life with our eyes and not with our puritanic moral sense. I have no words with which to express my contempt for that dull, blind, wickedly perverted thing called Puritanism." Dr. Lister now sat motionless, his knees a limp parallel. His perfect quiet, the intentness of his gaze, the complete stillness of all about them, suggested to Utterly a breathless moment in a play. He felt that he was talking well, that he had never talked better in his life. "But here, twenty years ago, was an exception, a glorious, shining exception. I found a story called 'Bitter Bread,' an essay called 'Roses of Pæstum,' and a poem called 'Storm.' Every one who has read them considers them extraordinary. They exhibit not only marvelous imaginative power, but an extensive experience of life, the experience of a man who has seen many things and felt all things. I am not one of those who hold that genius finds both its source and its material in itself, furnishing at once its own fuel and its own fire." Utterly paused for breath. Here was a well-expressed sentiment of which he must make mental and afterwards written note. "But--" began Dr. Lister. Utterly lifted his hand. "We found after a good deal of searching that one of the original manuscripts had been preserved. It was mailed from Waltonville, Pennsylvania, though the answer was to be sent to Baltimore. I had another errand here, and I was anxious to discover what I could about this contributor of twenty-five years ago, who promised such extraordinary things and who then, as far as we know, ceased to write. I belong to that class of biographers who believe that all is sacred and valuable in the development of genius. The facts of a writer's life are of transcendent importance. The power of imagination fails after a certain point, rather it does not begin until a certain degree of experience has been reached. A writer must have _lived_. I am hungry to know all you can tell me of Basil Everman. I mean to write about him at length." Utterly settled himself a little more comfortably in his chair. "You say that he is dead? How unfortunate!" "Yes," said Dr. Lister slowly. "He has been dead for twenty years." "Did he die here?" "No. He died away from home in an epidemic. It was not possible to bring his body home. His death seriously affected my wife, who is his sister, and who lost her father about the same time. I never saw Basil Everman either in life or death."