“Oh, Molly Brown, what a poor prevaricator you do make! You know perfectly well you have written something you want me to see; and you also know, or ought to know, that I want to see what you have written above everything; and what I said about would-be poets had nothing to do with you and me. The fact is, I am a would-be myself and have been working on a sonnet this afternoon instead of looking over the thousand themes that I must have finished before to-morrow’s lecture. I had just got the eighth line completed when you knocked, and the six others will be easy. Please come in and take off your hat, and I’ll get Mrs. Brady to make us some tea; and while the kettle is boiling you can show me what you have been doing, and when I get my other six lines to my sonnet done I’ll show it to you.” Molly of course had to comply with a request made with so much kindliness and sincerity. Mrs. Brady came, in answer to the professor’s bell which connected his study with his house, and was delighted to see Molly, remembering with great pleasure the Christmas breakfast the young girl had cooked for Professor Green the year before. Molly had a way with her that appealed to old people as well as young, and she had won Mrs. Brady’s heart on that memorable morning by telling her that she, too, boasted of Irish blood. “And I might have known it, from the sweet tongue in your head,” Mrs. Brady had replied. The old woman hastened off to make the tea, and Molly reluctantly unrolled her manuscript. “Professor Green, I want you to think of me as some one you do not know or like when you read my stuff.” “That is a very difficult task you have set me, and I am afraid one that I am unequal to; but I do promise to be unbiased and to give you my real opinion, and you must not be discouraged if it is not favorable, because, after all, it is worth very little.” “I think it is worth a lot. This first thing is something I have been working on very hard. It is called ‘The Basket Funeral.’ I remembered what you told me about trying to write about familiar things, and then, on reading the ‘Life and Letters of Jane Austen,’ I came on her advice to a niece who was contemplating a literary career. It was, ‘Send your characters where you have never been yourself, but never take them.’ I had never been out of Kentucky, except to row across the Ohio River to Indiana, when I came to Wellington, and so I put my story in Kentucky with Aunt Mary as my heroine. Now be as hard on me as you want to. I can stand it.”