“I feel warranted in the assumption that you will not find it necessary to alter or curtail my statements in any particular. I have had some previous experience in literary endeavours. In all modesty I may say that I am no novice. A signed article from my pen, entitled The Influence of the Holland--Dutch Strain Upon American Public Life, From Peter Stuyvesant to Theodore Roosevelt, was published some years since in the New York _Evening Post_, afterward becoming the subject of editorial comment in the Springfield _Republican_, the Hartford _Courant_ and the Boston _Transcript_. At present I am engaged in a brief history of one of our earlier presidents, the Honourable Martin Van Buren. I have the honour to bid you a very good day, sir.” Olcott ran the story in his next Sunday issue but one. It stretched the full length of two columns and invaded a third. It was tiresome and long-winded. It was as prosy as prosy could be. To make room for it a smartly done special on the commercial awakening of Schuyler County was crowded out. Olcott's judgment told him he did a sinful thing, but he ran it. He went further than that. Into the editorial page he slipped a paragraph directing attention to “Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht's timely and interesting article, appearing elsewhere in this number.” He had his reward, though, in the comments of sundry ones of his local subscribers. From these comments, made to him by letter and by word of mouth, he sensed something of the attitude of the community toward the Van Nicht family. As he figured, this sentiment was a compound of several things. It appeared to embody a gentle intolerance for the shell of social exclusiveness in which the present bearers of the name had walled themselves up, together with a sympathy for their poverty and their self-imposed state of lonely and neglected aloofness, and still further down, underlying these emotions and tincturing them, an understanding and an admiration for the importance of this old family as an old family--an admiration which was genuine and avowed on the part of some, and just as genuine but more or less reluctantly bestowed on the part of others. It was as Mayor McGlynn had informed Olcott on their first meeting. The Van Nichts were not so much individuals, having a share in the life of this thriving, striving, overgrown town, as they were historical fixtures and traditional assets. Collectively, they constituted something to be proud of and sorry for. Soon, too, he had further reward. One afternoon a small and grimy boy invaded his room, without knocking, and laid a note upon his desk. “Old guy downstairs, with long hair and a gimpy leg, handed me this yere and gimme fi' cents to fetch it up here to you,” stated the messenger.