Presently Mr. Appleby's manner changed. "I am a funny dog, I know," he seemed to say; "but duty is duty, and must be done." "How many lines have you at your house, Dunstable?" he asked. "About eight hundred, sir." "Then you had better write me eight hundred lines, and show them up to me in this room at--shall we say at ten minutes to five? It is now a quarter to, so that you will have plenty of time." Dunstable went, and returned five minutes later, bearing an armful of manuscript. "I don't think I shall need to count them," said Mr. Appleby. "Kindly take them in batches of ten sheets, and tear them in half, Dunstable." "Yes, sir." The last sheet fluttered in two sections into the surfeited waste-paper basket. "It's an awful waste, sir," said Dunstable regretfully. Mr. Appleby beamed. "We must, however," he said, "always endeavour to look on the bright side, Dunstable. The writing of these eight hundred lines will have given you a fine grip of the rhythm of Virgil, the splendid prose of Victor Hugo, and the unstudied majesty of the Greek Numerals. Good-night, Dunstable." "Good-night, sir," said the President of the Locksley Lines Supplying Trust, Ltd. THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTERS Dunstable had his reasons for wishing to obtain Mr. Montagu Watson's autograph, but admiration for that gentleman's novels was not one of them. It was nothing to him that critics considered Mr. Watson one of the most remarkable figures in English literature since Scott. If you had told him of this, he would merely have wondered in his coarse, material way how much Mr. Watson gave the critics for saying so. To the reviewer of the _Weekly Booklover_ the great man's latest effort, "The Soul of Anthony Carrington" (Popgood and Grooly: 6s.) seemed "a work that speaks eloquently in every line of a genius that time cannot wither nor custom stale." To Dunstable, who got it out of the school library, where it had been placed at the request of a literary prefect, and read the first eleven pages, it seemed rot, and he said as much to the librarian on returning it. Yet he was very anxious to get the novelist's autograph. The fact was that Mr. Day, his house-master, a man whose private life was in other ways unstained by vicious habits, collected autographs. Also Mr. Day had behaved in a square manner towards Dunstable on several occasions in the past, and Dunstable, always ready to punish bad behaviour in a master, was equally anxious to reward and foster any good trait which he might exhibit.