"There you come, Ralph, with your bird-conceits! You flap the wings of some thread-bare metaphor in my face, and I cannot see for the feathers! You are not a man to argue with. Poetical men never are: they make up in sentiment what they lack in sense; and very often it happens that a bit of poetry is more than a match for a piece of logic. 'No more of that, Hal, an' thou lovest me.' Your book is a miserable one. All your voluble ingenuity cannot controvert _that_." Barry's better nature had slipped out of him for a moment into the sunshine, like a turtle's head; but it slipped back again, and the speech that commenced with a laugh ended with a snarl. "It shows," he said, rumpling the manuscript with a careless hand, "a want of Art. The construction of the tale is crude: the characters are all old friends with new names--broken down stage-horses with new harnesses--and the prose throughout is uneven. How can it be otherwise, since it is only an intolerable echo of Hood, Dickens, and Charles Reade? Your want of artistic genius is shown in taking three chapters to elaborate "little Bell," who has no kind of influence in working out the plot, and who dies conveniently at Chapter III. Your imitative proclivities are prominent in the chapter headed 'A Few Specimens of Humanity.' Was ever anything more like the author of 'The Old Curiosity Shop?' Your short, jerky sentences are modeled after Reade's 'Peg Woffington,' and 'Christie Johnstone,' or any of Dumas' thefts. As to the plot, _that_ is altogether too improbable and silly for serious criticism. And then the title, 'Daisy's Necklace'--'Betsy's Garter!'" "Ah, Barry, this is only Fadladeen and Feramorz over again! Do you remember that after all the strictures of the eastern _savant_, Feramorz turned out to be not only a Poet but a Prince? I could take you to be 'Blackwood' slashing an American book, rather than a Yankee editor looking over a friend's virgin novel. You are like all critics, Barry. They ignore what might please them greatly if they had not their critical behavior on, and grow savage over that part of an author which they should speedily forget--like a dog on a country highway, that turns up his cold nose at the delicate hedge-blossoms, and growls over a decayed bone! So you find nothing to admire in my sixteen chapters?" "Not much." "Then say a good word for that little."