And throughout the next month, in the most out-of-the-way and unlikely quarters, the word Fladpick lurked and sprang upon the reader. Lines and phrases from Fladpick were quoted. Gradually the thing worked up, gathering momentum on its way, and going more and more of itself, like an ever-swelling snowball which needs but the first push down the mountain-side. Soon a leprosy of Fladpick broke out over the journalism of the day. The very office-boys caught the infection, and in their book reviews they dragged in Fladpick with an air of antediluvian acquaintance. Writers were said not to possess Fladpick's imagination, though they might have more sense of style, or they were said not to possess Fladpick's sense of style, though they might have more imagination. Certain epithets and tricks of manner were described as quite Fladpickian, while others were mentioned as extravagant and as disdained by writers like, say, Fladpick. Young authors were paternally invited to mould themselves on Fladpick, while others were contemptuously dismissed as mere imitators of Fladpick. By this time Fladpick's poetic dramas began to be asked for at the libraries, and the libraries said that they were all out. This increased the demand so much that the libraries told their subscribers they must wait till the new edition, which was being hurried through the press, was published. When things had reached this stage, queries about Fladpick appeared in the literary and professionally inquisitive papers, and answers were given, with reference to the editions of Fladpick's book. It began to leak out that he was a young Englishman who had lived all his life in Tartary, and that his book had been published by a local firm and enjoyed no inconsiderable reputation among the English Tartars there, but that the copies which had found their way to England were extremely scarce and had come into the hands of only a few _cognoscenti_, who being such were enabled to create for him the reputation he so thoroughly deserved. The next step was to contradict this, and the press teemed with biographies and counter-biographies. _Dazzler_ also wired numerous interviews, but an authoritative statement was inserted in the _Acadæum_, signed by Andrew Mackay, stating that they were unfounded, and paragraphs began to appear detailing how Fladpick spent his life in dodging the interviewers. Anecdotes of Fladpick were highly valued by editors of newspapers, and very plenteous they were, for Fladpick was known to be a cosmopolitan, always sailing from pole to pole and caring little for residence in the country of which he yet bade fair to be the laureate. These anecdotes girdled the globe even more quickly than their hero, and they returned from foreign parts bronzed and almost unrecognizable, to set out immediately on fresh journeys in their new guise.