"Sounds that way, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot, "but, all the same, here's a lady over in England has recently published a book of short stories by the late Frank R. Stockton, which his genial spirit has transmitted to the world through her. Now, if this thing can be done by Stockton, I don't see why it can't be done by Milton, Shakespeare, Moses, and others, and if I can only get hold of a real Psyche I'm going to get up a posthumous literary trust that will stagger humanity." "I guess it will!" laughed the Doctor. "Yes, sir," said the Idiot enthusiastically. "The first thing I shall do will be to send the lady after Charles Dickens and good old Thackeray, and apply for the terrestrial rights to all their literary subsequences, and, as a publisher really ought to do, I shall not content myself with just taking what they write of their own accord, but I'll supply them with subject matter. My posthumous literary trust will have a definite policy. "Can't you gentlemen imagine, for instance, what those two men could do with little old New York as it is to-day? What glorious results would come from turning Dickens loose on the underworld, and setting Thackeray's pen to work on the hupper sukkles of polite s'ciety! If there ever was a time when the reading public were ripe for another 'Oliver Twist' or another 'Vanity Fair', that time is now, and I can hardly sleep nights for thinking about it." "I don't see it at all," said the Bibliomaniac. "'Oliver Twist' is quite perfect as it is." "No doubt," retorted the Idiot, "but it isn't up-to-date, Mr. Bib. For example, think of a scene described by Dickens in which Fagin, now become a sort of man higher up, or at least one of his agents, takes little Oliver out into a Bowery back yard and makes a proficient gunman out of the kid, compelling him to practice in the flickering glare of an electric light at shooting tailor's dummies on a rapidly moving platform, with a .42-caliber six-shooter, until the lad becomes so expert that he can hit nineteen out of twenty as they pass, missing the twentieth only by a hair's breadth because it represents a man Fagin wants to scare and not kill. "Or think of how Thackeray would take hold of this tango tangle and expose the cubic contents of that Cubist crowd, and handle the exquisite dullness of the smart set, not with the glib brilliance of the man on the outside, who novelizes what he reads in the papers, but with the sounder satire of the man who knows from personal observation what he is writing about! Great heavens--the idea makes my mouth water!" "That might be worth while," confessed the Bibliomaniac. "But how are you going to get the facts over to Dickens and Thackeray?"