Like a thumb-nail sketch In the world of art; Like a humming-bird In leafy bowers; Like a pure quatrain In a poet’s heart; Like a harebell blue In a garden of flowers; Or like (I think this figure better) The post-script at the end of her letter. WAITMAN BARBE. TO BE PUBLISHED SHORTLY. LUCKY RICHARD’S MANUAL ON HOW TO SPEND MONEY. INTENDED FOR PERSONS OF SIMPLE TASTES WHO HAVE HAPPENED TO STRIKE TEN! This is probably the last subject under heaven I ever dreamed I should find occasion to discuss in print. But we are the playthings of Fate, and at this moment I am wholly immersed in weighty affairs and endless calculations as to what my income would be if this bibelot of literature became indispensable, as it undoubtedly should be, in thousands of homes in this country. When I have the figures satisfactorily arrived at on the basis of ten thousand subscribers, I see how easy it would be to introduce the periodical to the friends and relations of these ten thousand should-be delighted subscribers. Then my figures are naturally inconclusive and, as my wife says, with a fine belief in my destiny that is quite irresistible, _absurdly modest_. Then I’m bound to consider her figures, and her arithmetic becomes more convincing with her wants. She says that, out of a population of seventy million souls, there must be at least one million readers for the FLY LEAF. [Illustration] A woman who marries into Grub Street never appreciates the situation quite so vividly as the man who is to all intents and purposes born into it. To begin with, she is naturally somewhat prejudiced in her husband’s favor. I was foreordained by Providence for a career in Grub Street, and I could not marry out of it. A long acquaintance with its chances has made me less sanguine than my helpmate, and a million rather staggered me. I know that only good dead authors get a million readers, and then only in stolen editions. So to keep my wife’s imagination within bounds I told her it was true there were seventy millions in this country, but that not even the most credulous acceptors of that bad makeshift, human nature, would dream of calling them seventy million _souls_. The huge bulk was simply _the mob_! In the residuum some _souls_, and perhaps half a million intelligent people, were possibly to be found. Luckily some sense of humor saves me from the temptation of reckoning my possible gains in periodical literature on the data furnished by the Census Bureau. [Illustration]