"Live things." He laughed, tossed an apple into the air and caught it again. "I want first to make fifty millions, and then I want to spend fifty millions!" "What an admirable American you are!" "Am I not? And I vary it with just wanting to be a cowboy with a six-shooter on a Western plain--" He tossed the apple into the air again and, watching it, missed the glimpse of Hagar which the other two received. She appeared around the corner of a neighbouring cottage, her face directed toward the traveller's-joy porch, saw Coltsworth, wheeled and withdrew. He caught the apple, and after gazing meditatively for a moment in the direction of the tenpin-alley, sighed, and said that he supposed after all he might as well go help the General demolish the Army of the Potomac. "That's what he calls the pins when they're set up. He takes the biggest bowl and sends it thundering. I believe he thinks for the moment it is a ball from one of his old twenty-pounders. He sees fire and smells smoke. Sometimes he demolishes the Army of the Potomac and sometimes he doesn't; but he never gets discouraged. The next cannon ball will surely do the work!" When he was gone, and had been gone twenty minutes or more, Hagar reappeared. She came swiftly across the grass, mounted the porch steps, and stood, with a little deprecating shake of her head for the offered chair, by Elizabeth's work-table. "I am not going to stay, thank you! Miss Eden, somebody told me last night that you had written and published books--" "Only text and reference books--compilations," said Elizabeth. "I only do that kind of unoriginal work." "Yes, but a book is a book," said Hagar. "What I wondered was if you wouldn't be good enough to tell me some things. No one in all my connection writes--I don't know any one to go to. I only want to know plain things--A, B, C's of how to manage--" "About a manuscript, you mean?" "Yes. I don't know anything. I've read all kinds of useless things and so little useful! For instance," said Hagar, "is it wrong to write on both sides of the paper?" CHAPTER XIV NEW YORK In August--the Ashendynes being back at Gilead Balm--the "Young People's Home Magazine" published Hagar's fairy story. Gilead Balm was impressed, but not greatly impressed. It had the aristocratic tradition as to writers; no Ashendyne had ever needed to be one. There had been editor Ashendynes, in the old fiery, early, and mid-century times, but editorship came out naturally from the political stream, and the political, with law, planting, and soldiery, had been the Ashendyne stream. The Ashendyne mind harked back to Early Georgian, even to Stuart times; when you said "writer" it saw something Grub Streetish. In addition, Hagar's was, of course, only a child's story.