It was a new and curious occupation, which opened up to him whole worlds whose existence he had not previously suspected. Through his review-writing he had become acquainted with the books that had seen the light of day; now he made the startling discovery that for every one that was born, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, that died in the womb. He could see how it went--the hordes of half-educated people who read books and were moved to write something like them. Each manuscript was a separate tragedy; and often there would be a letter or a preface to make certain that one did not miss the sense of it. Here would be a settlement-worker, burning with a message, but unable to draw a character or to write dialogue; here would be a business-man, who had studied up the dialect of the region where he spent his summer vacations, and whose style was so crude that one winced as he turned the pages; here would be a poor bookkeeper, or a type-writer, or other cog in the business machine, who had read of the fortunes made by writers of fiction, and had spent all his hours of leisure for a year in composing a tale of the _grand monde_, or some feeble imitation of the sugar-coated “historical romance” of the hour. Sometimes as he read these manuscripts, a shudder would come over Thyrsis; how they made him realize the odds in the game of life! These thousands and tens of thousands panting and striving for success; and he lost in the throng of them! What madness it seemed to imagine that he might climb over their heads--that he had been chosen to scale the heights of fame! Their letters and prefaces sounded like a satire upon his own attitude, a _reductio ad absurdum_ of his claims to “genius”. Here, for instance, was a man who wrote to introduce himself as America’s first epic poet--stating incidentally that he was an inspector of gas-meters, and had a wife and six children. His poem occupied some six hundred foolscap sheets, finely bound up by hand; it set forth the soul-states of a Byron from Alabama--an aristocratic hero who was refused by the lady of his heart, and voiced his anger and perplexity in a long speech, two lines of which stamped themselves forever upon the mind of the reader--- “But I! he cried. My limbs are straight, My purse well-filled, my veins all F. F. V.!”