Gifted followed him into a dingy apartment in the attic, where one sat at a great table heaped and piled with manuscripts. By him was a huge basket, half full of manuscripts also. As they entered he dropped another manuscript into the basket and looked up. "Tell me," said Gifted, "what are these papers, and who is he that looks upon them and drops them into the basket?" "These are the manuscript poems that we receive, and the one sitting at the table is commonly spoken of among us as The Butcher. The poems he drops into the basket are those rejected as of no account." "But does he not read the poems before he rejects them?" "He tastes them. Do you eat a cheese before you buy it?" "And what becomes of all these that he drops into the basket?" "If they are not claimed by their author in proper season they go to the devil." "What!" said Gifted, with his eyes stretched very round. "To the paper factory, where they have a horrid machine they call the devil, that tears everything to bits,--as the critics treat our authors, sometimes,--_sometimes_, Mr. Hopkins." Gifted devoted a moment to silent reflection. After this instructive sight they returned together to the publisher's private room. The wine had now warmed the youthful poet's præcordia, so that he began to feel a renewed confidence in his genius and his fortunes. "I should like to know what that critic of yours would say to _my_ manuscript," he said boldly. "You can try it, if you want to," the publisher replied, with an ominous dryness of manner which the sanguine youth did not perceive, or, perceiving, did not heed. "How can we manage to get an impartial judgment?" "O, I'll arrange that. He always goes to his luncheon about this time. Raw meat and vitriol punch,--that's what the authors say. Wait till we hear him go, and then I will lay your manuscript so that he will come to it among the first after he gets back. You shall see with your own eyes what treatment it gets. I hope it may please him, but you shall see." They went back to the publisher's private room and talked awhile. Then the small boy came up with some vague message about a gentleman--business--wants to see you, sir, etc, according to the established programme; all in a vacant, mechanical sort of way, as if he were a talking-machine just running down. The publisher told the small boy that he was engaged, and the gentleman must wait. Very soon they heard The Butcher's heavy footstep as he went out to get his raw meat and vitriol punch. "Now, then," said the publisher, and led forth the confiding literary lamb once more, to enter the fatal door of the critical shambles.