And yet he seems to persevere--for 't is indeed an excellent way of circumventing the wily. In the Chicago _Record_ I read that he wrote to an autograph-beggar that he would send his autograph on receiving proof that the autograph-hunter had deposited two and a half dollars in a certain New York fresh air fund. This is an ingenious variation of the original scheme, for it puts aside the possibility of personal peculation; but I doubt whether it answers. Each celebrity must solve for himself this harassing problem: there be those who simply stick to the stamps ... great free spirits, these, the Napoleons of the pen, _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_, whose names it is not for me to bewray. Others, like myself, stricken with the paralysis of a Puritan conscience, waver and vex themselves. One ought not to encourage this craze for the external accidents of greatness--the appeal may be fraudulent--and yet what right have you to the stamps?--and after all 't is flattering to be adored from Terra del Fuego; it argues taste--and taste should not go unrecognized in a Philistine world. _Eureka!_ I have found the solution. Don't stick to the stamps, but send _them_ to the funds of a charity. These views of mine on autographs have greatly distressed the unfair sex. The ladies--God bless them--resent a severely logical view of anything, and to disturb their small sentimentalities is to be cold-blooded and cynical. Once, when I wasj imprudent enough to wonder if the "young person" with the well-known cheek, to which blushes were brought, existed any longer in this age of neurotic novels written by ladies for gentlemen, I received a delicious communication from an Australian damsel informing me that she had been in love with me up till the fatal day on which she read my cynical conception of her sex,--which reminds me of another well-meaning young lady who wrote me the other day from America that her epistle was prompted "neither by love nor admiration." If I hint that popular lady novelists do not invariably produce masterpieces of style and syntax, I am accused of inflicting the "tarantulous bites of envious detractors." I am driven--most reluctantly--to a suspicion that has long been faintly glimmering in my bosom, a suspicion that ladies have no sense of humour. It is gravely pointed out to me by incensed writers of incense-laden letters that the demand for a writer's autograph is a mark of veneration; that his letter is reverentially handed about on special occasions quite without a thought of its possible commercial value and that often--though here the argument itself becomes cunningly commercial--it becomes the focus of a local hero-worship that expresses itself outwardly in increased purchases of the author's books. Now, of course every author is only too aware that requests for his autographs are manifestations of reverence, and is only too apt to disregard the supposition of crude curiosity. He knows that it is only natural that