Years ago one of them confided to me his recipe for a _Ledger_ poem. “Whatever you do,” he said, “be careful not to use up a whole idea on a single poem, for if you do you’ll never be able to make a cent. I usually cut an idea into eight pieces, like a pie, and write a poem for each piece, though once or twice I have made sixteen pieces out of one. My ‘Two Brothers’ idea yielded me just sixteen poems, all accepted, for which I received $160. What do I mean by cutting up an idea? Well, I’ll tell you. I took for a whole idea two brothers brought up on a farm in the country, one of whom goes down to the city, while the other stays at home on the farm. Well, I wrote eight poems about those brothers, giving them such names as Homespun Bill and Fancy Jake, and the city man always went broke, and was glad to get back to the country again and find that Homespun Bill had either paid the mortgage on the place or saved the house from burning, or done something else calculated to commend him to the haymakers who subscribed for the paper. Then I wrote eight more, and in every one of those it was the yokel who got left; that is to say, Fancy Jake or Dashing Tom, or whatever I might choose to call him, would go to the city and either get rich in Wall Street--always Wall, never Broad or Nassau Street or Broadway, remember--and come back just in time to stop the sheriff’s sale and bid in the old homestead for some unheard-of figure, or else he would become a great physician and return to save his native village at a time of pestilence, or maybe I’d have him a great preacher and come back and save all their souls; anyway, I got eight more poems out of the pair, to say nothing of some stories that I used in another paper.” I pondered for several moments over the words of the poet and then I said to him, “But if you were so successful with the ‘Two Brothers’ why didn’t you try to do as well with two sisters?” “I did,” he replied. “I started a ‘Two Sisters’ series as soon as the brothers were all harvested, but I got them back on my hands again. You know Bonner is down on sisters.” “Bonner is down on sisters!” What stumbling-blocks there were in the path to literary fame which the poets of the early _Ledger_ period sought to tread!