The fiction magazines also have cut into the sale of ephemeral novels. For the price of one novel the uncritical reader may fortify himself with enough reading matter to keep him diverted for a month. Nowadays the hurrying citizen approaches the magazine counter in much the same spirit in which he attacks the help-yourself lunch-trough--grabs what he likes and retires for hurried consumption. It must, however, be said for the much-execrated magazine editors that with all their faults and defaults they are at least alive to the importance and value of American material. They discovered O. Henry, now recognized as a writer of significance. I should like to scribble a marginal note at this point to the effect that writers who are praised for style, those who are able to employ _otiose_, _meticulous_, and _ineluctable_ with awe-inspiring inadvertence in tales of morbid introspection, are not usually those who are deeply learned in the ways and manners of that considerable body of our people who are obliged to work for a living. We must avoid snobbishness in our speculations as to the available ingredients from which American fiction must be made. Baseball players, vaudeville and motion-picture performers, ladies employed as commercial travellers, and Potash and Perlmutter, are all legitimate subjects for the fictionist, and our millions undoubtedly prefer just now to view them humorously or romantically. V In our righteous awakening to the serious plight to which our fiction has come it is not necessary, nor is it becoming, to point the slow unmoving finger of scorn at those benighted but well-meaning folk who in times past did what they could toward fashioning an American literature. We all see their errors now; we deplore their stupidity, we wish they had been quite different; but why drag their bones from the grave for defilement? Cooper and Irving meant well; there are still misguided souls who find pleasure in them. It was not Hawthorne’s fault that he so bungled _The Scarlet Letter_, nor Poe’s that he frittered away his time inventing the detective story. Our deep contrition must not betray us into hardness of heart toward those unconscious sinners, who cooled their tea in the saucer and never heard of a samovar!