I am compelled, through severe strain, to discontinue my work (involving the mental faculties) with which I have puzzled the scientific world for several years, and which has netted me a weekly income of over $200; I have no other source for a livelihood and consequently appeal to the business world for an opportunity to grow up in a new endeavor. WHY NOT MEET ME AND TALK IT OVER? A genuinely touching ad, sensible and obviously quite sincere, in which you hear the appealing voice of a fellow being in trouble, but an ad which I fear is rather futile, is one like this: Am 43 years old; defective hearing prevents continuation of salesman's career; I want situation where this impairment does not prevent satisfactory discharge of required duties. A great, and a grave, lesson may be learned from the "Situations Wanted" page. And that is to be found mainly in the section where the first word of each advertisement is simply "MAN." Men there are in it of every age. I mean in considering the plight of the world one should ponder that great army whose business is "anything." CHAPTER XIV LITERARY LIVES "My God!" exclaimed the old lady in the railway carriage to Mr. Le Gallienne, "Tennyson is dead!" Have not many of us as we have turned the daily papers these last several years frequently experienced the sensations of this dear old lady? Whistler, Swinburne, Meredith, Henry James, Howells. They are dead. Walt Whitman (wasn't it?), when he heard that Carlyle was dead, went out, and looked up at the stars, and said he didn't believe it. We have been stirred to these emotional reflections by chancing to come early this afternoon in the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library upon what would commonly be called a well-known book of reference. We had no intention of doing more than peer into it. Night found us there--the book still open before us. The excellent Solomon Eagle (otherwise known as J. C. Squire), in one of his delightfully gossipy, though erudite, papers contributed to _The New Statesman_ of London (collected, many of them, into a volume, bearing the title "Books in General"), remarks of works of reference that they "are extremely useful; but they resemble Virgil's Hell in that they are easy things to get into and very difficult to escape from." He continues: Take the Encyclopædia. I imagine that my experience with it is universal. I have only to dip my toe into this tempting morass and down I am sucked, limbs, trunk and all, to remain embedded until sleep or a visitor comes to haul me out. A man will read things in the Encyclopædia that he would never dream of looking at elsewhere--things in which normally he does not take the faintest interest....