"I am told," said he, "that many a truly meritorious production has gone unpublished for years because the labor of deciphering the author's handwriting proved too much for the reader's endurance--and it is very natural that it should be so. A professional reader is, after all, only human, and when to the responsibilities of his office is added the wearisome task of wading through a Spencerian morass after the will-o'-wisp of an idea, I don't blame him for getting impatient. Why, I saw the original manuscript of one of Charles Dickens's novels once, and I don't see how any one knew it was good enough to publish until it got into print!" "That's simply a proof of what I've always said," observed one of the Snobbe boys. "If Charles Dickens's works had been written by me, no one would ever have published them." "I haven't a doubt of it," returned Billy Jones of the _Oracle_, dryly. "Why, Snobbey, my boy, I believe if you had written the plays of Shakespeare they'd have been forgotten ages ago!" "So do I," returned Snobbe, innocently. "This is a queer world." "The stenographer will save us a great deal of trouble," said Bedford. "The hard part of literary work is, after all, the labor of production in a manual sense. These real geniuses don't have to think. Their ideas come to them, and they let 'em develop themselves. In realistic writing, as I understand it, the author sits down with his pen in his hand and his characters in his mind's eye, and they simply run along, and he does the private-detective act--follows after them and jots down all they do. In imaginative writing it's done the same way. The characters of these ridiculous beings we read of are quite as real to the imaginative writer as the characters of the realist are to the latter, and they do supernatural things naturally. So you see these things require very little intellectual labor. It's merely the drudgery of chasing a commonplace or supernatural set of characters about the world in order to get 400 pages full of reading-matter about 'em that makes the literary profession a laborious one. Our stenographer will enable us to avoid all this. There isn't a man of us but can talk as easily as he can fall off a log, and a tale once told at our dinners becomes in the telling a bit of writing." "But, my dear Parke," said Billy Jones of the _Oracle_, who had been a "literary journalist," as his fond grandmother called it, for some years, "a story told is hardly likely to be in the form calculated to become literature."