he was distracted. He raved like a maniac--and like a maniac did not even write his ravings down for after use. He applied at Scotland Yard, but the superintendent said that drivers brought there only articles of value. He sent paragraphs to the papers, asking even of the _Echo_ where his lost novel was. But the _Echo_ answered not. Several spiteful papers insinuated that he was a liar, and a high-class comic paper went out of its way to make a joke, and to call his book "The Mystery of a Hansom Cab." The annoying part of the business was that after getting all this gratuitous advertisement, in itself enough to sell two editions, the book still refused to come up for publication. Maunders was too heart-broken to write another. For months he went about, a changed being. He had put the whole of himself into that book, and it was lost. He mourned for the departed manuscript, and generously extolled its virtues. For years he remained faithful to its memory; and its pages were made less dry with his tears. But the most intemperate grief wears itself out at last; and after a few years of melancholy, Maunders rallied and became a critic. [Illustration: THE GREAT CRITIC.] As a critic he set in with great severity, and by carefully refraining from doing anything himself, gained a great reputation far and wide. In due course he joined the staff of the _Acadæum_, where his signed contributions came to be looked for with profound respect by the public and with fear and trembling by authors. For Maunders' criticism was so very superior, even for the _Acadæum_, of which the trade motto was "Stop here for Criticism--superior to anything in the literary market." Maunders flayed and excoriated Marsyas till the world accepted him as Apollo. What Maunders was most down upon was novel-writing. Not having to follow them himself, he had high ideals of art; and woe to the unfortunate author who thought he had literary and artistic instinct when he had only pen and paper. Maunders was especially severe upon the novels of young authors, with their affected style and jejune ideas. Perhaps the most brilliant criticism he ever wrote was a merciless dissection of a book of this sort, reeking with the insincerity and crudity of youth, full of accumulated ignorance of life, and brazening it out by flashy cynicism. A week after this notice appeared, his oldest and dearest friend called upon him and asked him for an explanation. "What do you mean?" said Maunders. "When I read your slashing notice of 'A Fingersnap for Fate,' I at once got the book." "What! After I had disembowelled it; after I had shown it was a stale sausage stuffed with old and putrid ideas?"