As, at that hour which sets the weary toiler free, in the gathering dusk Keyes stood on the curb amid the hurrying throng homeward bound,--oh! how he longed for that establishment in the eyes of men which the success of his story would bring him. Oh, when would he hear! As he bowled along in the crowded trolley the thought stole through him, until it amounted almost to a conviction, that the great letter awaited him at home now. He could hardly bear the tedium of the short journey. Restlessly he turned his evening paper. In him had developed of late a great interest in authors; he peered between the pages, a little sheepishly, at the column, "Books and Their Makers." He read that Mr. So and So, the author of "This and That," was a young man thirty years of age. Instantly he reflected that he himself was but twenty-seven. This was encouraging! He had formed a habit recently of contrasting at once any writer's age with his own. If he learned that Mr. Galsworthy, whose books were much advertised but which he had not read, was forty-something, he wanted to know how old he had been when he wrote his first book. Then he counted up the number of books between that time--comparing his age at that time with his own--and now. He was absorbed in the literary gossip of the day. That Myra Kelly had been a schoolteacher, that Gertrude Atherton lived in California, that Mr. Bennett had turned thirty before he published his first book, that such a writer was in Rome, or that some other one was engaged on a new work said to be about the Russian Jews,--he found very interesting. He read in his newspaper the publishers' declaration that Maurice Hewlett's new creation recalled Don Quixote, Cyrano, d'Artagnan, Falstaff, Bombastes Furioso, Tartarin, Gil Blas. His notions concerning the characters of this company were somewhat vague; but he was stirred with an ambition to create some such character, too. On leaving the car whom should he see but Dr. Nevens. They walked along together. Dr. Nevens inquired about the business. A bad year, he surmised, for trade. Trade! Keyes felt his heart thumping with the temptation to confide the adventures of his literary life; which, indeed, he had found exceedingly difficult to keep so much to himself. But his position gave him clairvoyance: he divined that no sort of ambition receives from people in general so little respect, by some curious idiosyncrasy of the human mind, as literary aspiration. With what coarse and withering scorn had an intimation--which had escaped him--that he had sought to give some artistic articulation to his ideas been met by Pimpkins the other day at the office!