HOW JIMABOY FOUND HIMSELF BY FRANCIS LYNDE When Jimaboy began to live by his wits--otherwise, when he set up author and proposed to write for bread and meat--it was a time when the public appetite demanded names and _naivete_. And since Jimaboy was fresh enough to satisfy both of these requirements, the editors looked with favor upon him, and his income, for a little while, exceeded the modest figure of the railroad clerkship upon which he had ventured to ask Isobel to marry him. But afterward there came a time of dearth; a period in which the new name was no longer a thing to conjure with, and artlessness was a drug on the market. Cleverness was the name of the new requirement, and Jimaboy's gift was glaringly sentimental. When you open your magazine at "The Contusions of Peggy, by James Augustus Jimaboy," you are justly indignant when you find melodrama and predetermined pathos instead of the clever clowneries which the sheer absurdity of the author's signature predicts. "Item," said Jimaboy, jotting it down in his notebook while Isobel hung over the back of his chair: "It's a perilous thing to make people cry when they are out for amusement. Did the postman remember us this morning?" Isobel nodded mournfully. "And the crop?" said Jimaboy. "Three manuscripts; two from New York and one from Boston." "'So flee the works of men Back to the earth again,'" quoted the sentimentalist, smiling from the teeth outward. "Is that all?" "All you would care about. There were some fussy old bills." "Whose, for instance?" "Oh, the grocer's and the coal man's and the butcher's and the water company's, and some other little ones." "'Some other little ones'," mused Jimaboy. "There's pathos for you. If I could ever get that into a story, with your intonation, it would be cheap at fifteen cents the word. We're up against it, Bella, dear." "Well?" she said, with an arm around his neck. "It isn't well; it's confoundedly ill. It begins to look as if it were 'back to the farm' for us." She came around to sit on the arm of the chair. "To the railroad office? Never! Jimmy, love. You are too good for that." "Am I? That remains to be proved. And just at present the evidence is accumulating by the ream on the other side--reams of rejected MS." "You haven't found yourself yet; that is all." He forced a smile. "Let's offer a reward. 'Lost: the key to James and Isobel Jimaboy's success in life. Finder will be suitably recompensed on returning same to 506 Hayward Avenue, Cleland, Ohio.'" She leaned over and planted a soft little kiss on the exact spot on his forehead where it would do the most good. "I could take the city examination and teach, if you'd let me, Jimmy." He shook his head definitely. That was ground which had been gone over before.