“I am sorry to have to tell you that the decision has been adverse to using your story. My own opinion of it has not changed in the least; but I have been unable to induce my associates to view it in the same light. They seem to be unanimous in the opinion that your work is too radical for us to put to the front. We have a very conservative, fastidious, and sophisticated constituency; and this is one of the limitations by which we are bound. I am more than sorry that things have turned out so, and I trust I need hardly say that I shall be glad to read anything else that you may have to submit to us.” And there it was! “A conservative, fastidious, and sophisticated constituency!” Thyrsis believed that he would never forget that phrase while he lived. Could one get up a thing like that anywhere in the world save in Boston? It was a bitter and cruel disappointment--the more so because it had taken six weeks of his precious time. But there was nothing to be done about it save to send off the manuscript to another magazine. And when it had come back from there he sent it to another, and to yet another--paying each time a total of eighty cents to the express-company, a sum which was very hard for him to spare. To make an ending at once to the painful episode, he continued to send it from one place to another, until “The Hearer of Truth” had had the honor of being declined by a total of fifteen magazines and twenty-two publishing-houses. The pilgrimage occupied a period of nineteen months--after which, to Thyrsis’ great surprise, the thirty-eighth concern offered to publish it. And so the book was brought out, with something of a flourish, and met with its thirty-eighth rejection--at the hands of the public! BOOK VII THE CAPTURE IS COMPLETED _The shadow of a dark cloud had fallen upon the woods, and the voices of the birds were strangely hushed. “There is a spell about this place for me,” she said, and quoted-- “Here came I often, often in old days-- Thyrsis and I, we still had Thyrsis then!” “Where is Thyrsis now?” she asked; and he smiled sadly, and responded: “Ah me! this many a year My pipe is lost, my shepherd’s holiday! Needs must I lose them, needs with heavy heart Into the world and wave of men depart!”_ Section 1. They returned to the city early in October--not so much because they minded the cold in the tent, as because their money was gone, and it was not easy to do hack-work at a distance. One had to be on the spot, to interview the editors, to study their whims and keep one’s self in their minds; otherwise some one else got the work. So Thyrsis came back to his “world”; and he found this world up in arms against him. All the opposition that he had ever had to face was nothing to what he faced now. Society seemed to have made up its collective mind that he should give in; and every force it could use was brought to bear upon him--every person he knew joined in the assault upon him.