“You set fire to the girl while I take care of the house!” or vice versa, and so saying, bear the fainting heroine triumphantly off from the treacherous redskins. But the story has lived. * * * * * It was a happy and honored custom in the old days for subscribers to the New York Ledger and the New York Weekly to unite in requests for the serial republication of favorite stories in those great fireside luminaries. They were the old-fashioned, broadside sheets and, of course, there were insuperable difficulties against preserving the numbers. After a year or two, therefore, there would awaken a general hunger among the loyal hosts to “read the story over,” and when the demand was sufficiently strong the publishers would repeat it, cuts, divisions, and all, just as at first. How many times the “Gunmaker of Moscow” was repeated in the Ledger, heaven knows. I remember I petitioned repeatedly for “Buffalo Bill” in the Weekly, and we got it, too, and waded through it again. By wading, I don't mean pushing laboriously and tediously through, but, by George! half immersion in the joy. It was a week between numbers, and a studious and appreciative boy made no bones of reading the current weekly chapters half a dozen times over while waiting for the next. It must have been ten years later that I felt a thrill at the coming of Buffalo Bill himself in his first play. I had risen to the dignity of dramatic critic upon a journal of limited civilization and boundless politics, and was privileged to go behind the scenes at the theatre and actually speak to the actors. (I interviewed Mary Anderson during her first season, in the parlor of the local hotel, where honest George Bristow--who kept the cigar stand and could not keep a healthy appetite--always gave a Thanksgiving order for “two-whole-roast turkeys and a piece of breast,” and they were served, too, the whole ones going to some near-by hospital, and the piece of breast to George's honest stomach--good, kind soul that he was. And Miss Anderson chewed gum during the whole period of the interview to the intense amusement of my elder and brother dramatic critic, who has since become the honored governor of his adopted state, and toward whom I beg to look with affectionate memory of those days.) Now, when a man has known novels intimately, has been dramatic critic, and has traveled with a circus, it seems to me in all reason he can not fairly have any other earthly joys to desire. At fifteen I was walking on tip-toe about the house on Sundays, and going off to the end of the garden to softly whistle “weekday” tunes, and at twenty I stood off the wings L. U. E., and had twenty “Black Crook” coryphees in silk tights and tarletan squeeze past in line, and nod and say, “Is it going all right in front?” They--knew--I--was--the--Critic! When you can do that you can laugh at Byron, roosting around upon inaccessible mountain crags and formulating solitude and indigestion into poetry!