I enter upon these considerations because I have been employed by a committee of _aluminados_, heeled well enough to pay my honorarium, to conjure up recognizable images of MM. George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, that their scattered partisans and the public generally may see them more clearly. The job has its difficulties, for save in their joint editorial concern with _The Smart Set_ magazine and their common antipathy to certain prevailing sophistries, they are no more alike than a hawk and a handsaw. But in one other thing, at least, they also coalesce, and that is in the paucity of news about them. Most other magazine editors are constantly in the papers—discoursing on the literary art, agitating for this or that, getting themselves interviewed. These twain, however, pursue a more _pianissimo_ course, and so not much is known about them, even inaccurately.... II The job invites. One reads regularly what magazine editors think of their contributors, but who ever reads what magazine contributors—of whom I, Hatteras, am one—think of their editors? A vast and adventurous field here enrolls itself, believe me. I know, more or less intimately, most of the editors of the great American periodicals, and I am constantly amused by the inaccuracy of the prevailing notions about them—notions diligently fostered, in many cases, by their own more or less subtle chicane. Consider, for example, the dean of the order, M. George Harvey, of the _North American Review_. His portrait shows a thoughtful old gentleman reading a book, his forefinger pressed affectionately against his right frontal sinus. Recalling the high mental pressure of his daily concerns, one concludes at once that he is struggling through Talboys Wheeler’s epitome of the Maha-Bhārāta, or Locke’s “Conduct of the Understanding.” But I have it from the Colonel himself—a confidence quite spontaneous and apparently sincere—that at the precise moment the photographer squeezed the bird he was thinking—what? Simply this: how much prettier Mlle. Mary Pickford would be if her lower limbs were less richly developed laterally. The book was the _Photoplay Magazine_.