“Bonner is down on stepmothers!” “All _Ledger_ horses must be called Dobbin, and there is a heavy fine for driving them through a poem or serial faster than a walk, or, at best, a slow trot!” “Don’t write anything about cousins marrying unless you want to have them back on your hands again!” These were a few of the beacon-lights that shone on the literary pathway of twenty years ago, and I know of more than one successful writer whose early footsteps were guided by the great artistic principles first laid down by Robert Bonner and religiously followed by the makers of prose and verse who brought their wares to him every Friday morning. But poor Jack Moran did not live to become a successful writer. He dropped out of the ranks just as the rest of us were passing the quarter-post, but it was the first hurdle that really did for him. I have often thought that if Jack had taken his friend’s advice and “changed his poem round so as to make the stepmother a beast,” he might have lived to fill a responsible position in the Franklin Square Prose and Verse Foundry, or at the Eagle Verse Works in Jersey City. But Jack was a poet, and therefore did not know how to “change his poem round,” and besides he hated to go to work every morning with his dinner-pail in his hand, and there were cakes and ale in Bohemia in those days for such as he. As for the poet who tried to guide Jack’s footsteps in the path that led to fame, he is alive to-day, and a highly esteemed member of the guild. Indeed, a more industrious, sober, or thrifty man of letters never put on a pair of overalls or crossed the North River in the early morning boat with a basket of poems, jokes, and stories on his arm. One Friday morning, many years ago, I went with this poet to the _Ledger_ building, and there found half a dozen writers gathered together in an outer office, anxiously watching the dark shadow of a man that was thrown upon a partition of ground glass that extended from floor to ceiling across the room and separated it from the private office of the great editor. The dark moving shadow on which every eye was fixed was that of Robert Bonner himself, and as it was seen to cross the room to a remote corner--growing smaller and fainter as it receded--every face brightened with hope, and forms that had seemed bent and dejected but a moment before were suddenly straightened. An instant later the door opened and the editor of the _Ledger_ crossed the threshold, handed a ten-dollar bill to one of the waiting poets, and then hastily retired to his own den again.