‘Hang it, what can a fellow do?’ cried Slasher. ‘You are the most pertinacious little beggar I ever came across. Do you think a man can go and eat his own words and stultify himself? Look here, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You shall write a notice of the Hydrographic for the “Sword.” Blow the fellow’s trumpet up to the skies, if you like; say there’s never been anything like him since Titian. And I’ll take it to Crowther. Now I don’t see what more a man can do.’ ‘I write the notice for the “Sword!”’ cried Laurie, laughing,--‘that is a little too strong. I never put a sentence together in my life.’ ‘As if that had anything to do with it!’ said the critic. ‘Why that’s the only good thing I can see in this blessed trade of literature. You can go at it off-hand. Put a sentence together! Why I’ve heard you put twenty. It’s nothing but talking, my dear fellow. A practical writer like myself, you know, goes off at the nail, and talks of fifty other subjects before he touches the right one; but I can fancy that the public, by way of a change, might prefer to hear what you wanted to say at once. Of course you can do it; and I’ll take it to Crowther. A man cannot make a fairer offer than that.’ ‘It is awfully good of you,’ said Laurie, in a ferment. The proposal went tingling through his veins like wine. It had seemed supremely ridiculous to him when old Welby had suggested that he should take to writing, just as he might have suggested shoe-making or carpentry. But from Slasher, to whom the doors of the ‘Sword’ were open,--and in Suffolk’s interest,--the idea changed its aspect. Though there are no labourers of any description who so systematically underrate their trade as do professors of literature, yet it is astonishing how pleased every outsider is who is invited to enter that magic circle. Laurie felt that Slasher in his turn had paid him the most delicate compliment. Though he might have laughed at the ‘Sword’ and the critic, and at newspapers and critics in general, at another moment, no sooner was he asked to strike in, in the _mêlée_, than the craft and all its adjuncts became splendid to Laurie. What a power it was! How a word in the ‘Sword’ thrilled through and through those regions where artists congregated, filling some with boundless satisfaction and others with despair! When he cried out, in modest delight and surprise, ‘I write a notice for the “Sword!”’ thinking it too grand to be true, he already felt himself ever so much more important, so much cleverer and greater a person than he had been five minutes before. Perhaps, it is true, the smoke and the beverage that accompanied it, and the fact that it was two o’clock in the morning, had something to do with Laurie’s pleasure in the proposal, as it had with Mr. Slasher’s liberality in making it;--but still there it was. Laurie Renton, whom everybody had snubbed, down to Forrester,--whom everybody had interfered with and advised and ordered about ‘for his