The "bad eminence" of turning down Sterling's great poem is one that you will have to share with some of your esteemed fellow magazinists--for examples, the editors of the Atlantic, Harper's, Scribner's, The Century, and now the Metropolitan, all of the elite. All of these gentlemen, I believe, profess, as you do not, to know literature when they see it, and to deal in it. Well I profess to deal in it in a small way, and if Sterling will let me I propose some day to ask judgment between them and me. Even _you_ ask for literature--if my stories are literature, as you are good enough to imply. (By the way, all the leading publishers of the country turned down that book until they saw it published without them by a merchant in San Francisco and another sort of publishers in London, Leipzig and Paris.) Well, you wouldn't do a thing to one of my stories! No, thank you; if I have to write rot, I prefer to do it for the newspapers, which make no false pretences and are frankly rotten, and in which the badness of a bad thing escapes detection or is forgotten as soon as it is cold. I know how to write a story (of the "happy ending" sort) for magazine readers for whom literature is too good, but I will not do so so long as stealing is more honorable and interesting. I've offered you the best stuff to be had--Sterling's poem--and the best that I am able to make; and now you must excuse me. I do not doubt that you really think that you would take "the kind of fiction that made 'Soldiers and Civilians' the most readable book of its kind in this country," and it is nice of you to put it that way; but neither do I doubt that you would find the story sent a different kind of fiction and, like the satire which you return to me, "out of the question." An editor who has a preformed opinion of the kind of stuff that he is going to get will always be disappointed with the stuff that he does get. I know this from my early experience as an editor--before I learned that what I needed was, not any particular kind of stuff, but just the stuff of a particular kind of writer. All this without any feeling, and only by way of explaining why I must ask you to excuse me. Sincerely yours, AMBROSE BIERCE. [Washington, D. C., December 6, 1904.] DEAR GEORGE, * * * * *