About fifteen years ago sundry poems, essays, and short stories, bearing a signature which is almost forgotten now, began to attract the attention of the critical, and before long their author came to be looked upon as one of the most promising and talented young writers in the city. Unfortunately for himself, however, his very cleverness and its remarkable precocity proved his ultimate ruin. He was a very young man when he emerged from his native commonplace obscurity and crept, almost unaided, to the very edge of the great white fierce light in whose rays the most ordinary of folks become famous. And, having reached the outer edge of this brilliant disk of light, he leisurely sate himself down to rest, firmly believing that he was in the very center of it, and that the silly flattery of underbred and half-educated women, and some ridiculous puffery at the hands of time-serving reviewers and paragraphers, were the greenest bays of Parnassus. He became thoroughly satisfied with himself and with his work; and the Swelled Head assumes no more virulent or insidious form than that. He did not become an unpleasant, egotistical nuisance, as many people similarly afflicted do. I cannot remember that he talked very much about himself or his work; he simply agreed with himself that he was the greatest writer of the age, and that he had already achieved fame and glory of the highest sort. That was not more than a dozen years ago, and at that time his name was on everybody’s lips as the “coming man” of the period. Ah me! how many of these “coming” men and women have come and gone along the outer edge of the great white light within my short memory! In the past six years I have not seen anything from his pen nor heard him spoken of a dozen times. I saw him the other night on Third Avenue, and if the light from a huge sibilant electric lamp had not shone upon him much more vividly than the great white light of fame ever did, I would never have known him. Seedy, abject, repulsive, he seemed fitted for no rôle in life other than that of an “awful example” to accompany one whose profession it is to go about delivering lectures on the evil results of indulgence in Swelled Head. In another case of Swelled Head which has come under my observation, the victim is a woman--rather an unusual thing, for a woman’s vanity is not, as a rule, as deep-seated as a man’s. This woman, whom I will call Margaret Mealy, and whose real name is well known to thousands of magazine readers, dwells in a pleasant inland town and has for a neighbor an old-time friend and fellow-writer named Henry Kornkrop. Both are graduates of the old _Ledger_ school--many a Friday morning have they sat side by side on the poets’ bench in the outer office, watching the awful shadow of Robert Bonner moving to and fro behind the glass partition--and both have been successful, though in widely different ways.