“Oh, shut up!... No good chucking the idiot roughly.... It’s beastly long.... We’ll chuck it for length, eh?” Netherby Gomme smiled at him: “Noll,” said he, “you are possessed of the magnificent carelessness of the gods--and I never interfere with religious bodies.” Noll turned to his writing again, and there was a steady scratching of pen on paper. Netherby Gomme sat for awhile, his face seamed with comic lines of grim amusement: “I suppose,” he said at last--“I suppose we have read the poem, Oliver?” “No, _I_ haven’t. But _you_ can.” Netherby Gomme moved uneasily in his seat: “N-no. No thanks, Oliver. We’ll take it as read.” He coughed: “By the way, Oliver, have you got the dummy for next week’s issue over there?” Noll licked, sealed, and thumped the letter on the desk: “Oh, ah, yes--I’m sitting on it and a bunch of keys to remind me.” He took a bunch of keys from under him, and put them in his trousers pocket, then lugged out from beneath him the dummy form of the review in its brown-paper cover. He opened it, and wetting his finger on his lip, he flipped through the leaves with their proofs pasted in position for guidance to the printer. “Look here, Netherby.” He held up the booklet, pointing to a blank space. “The governor said I was to tell you we had better complete this column with a poem--says verse gives a pleasant appearance to the page.” He dropped the dummy on the desk in front of him. “It’s an awful bore, Netherby,” said he, “but that bundle of poems he gave me the other day took up such a lot of space on my desk that I flung them into the waste-paper basket. Can’t you knock up about twenty lines of amorous matter? I promise not to whistle.” Netherby Gomme smiled grimly, sighed, took up a pen, and, drawing a sheet of paper to him, prepared to write.... The yellow-haired youth had been with this literary venture from the start. He had begun as office-boy; and as each member of the original staff had fallen out, at the stern prunings of necessity, he had been promoted to their places, until he sat alone, as leader-writer, humorist, topical poet, sentimentalist, sub-editor, office lad, and general usefulness. Scrupulous to the smallest detail, reliable in the performance of the minutest fraction of his bond, he got through his work with the facility of a man of affairs; and, like all busy men, finding time for everything, he had spent his hours of leisure outside the office in the humane atmosphere of the theatre, in the tragic fellowship of the street, in the eternal fresh comedy of the city’s by-ways, and in the company of the mighty masters of his tongue; in this, the best school of education in all the round world, he had acquired such a knowledge of letters, such a taste for the niceties of the written word, and such a mastery in its use, as would have astounded, as indeed it was destined to astound, even them that thought they knew him to his fullest powers.