Mr. Stack's Story

Some time ago a young man named Stack sent a serial story to the Mom ing Argus in our vülage, and after waiting a while and hearing nothing about it, lie concluded to cali upon the editor, Col. Bangs, in order to ascertain why that narrativo had not attracted attention. When Stack mentioned nis errand, the Colonel reached f or the manuscript, and looking very solemn, he said : "Mr. Stack, I don't think I can accept this story. In some respecta it is really wonderf ui ; but I am afraid that, if I published it, it would attract too much attention. People would get too wild over it. We have to be careful. Forinstance, here in the first chapter you mention the death of Mrs. McGinnis, the hero's mother. She dios ; you inter Mrs. McGinnis in the cemetery ; you give an effecting scène at the funeral ; you run up a monument over her, and plant honeysuckles upon her grave. You créate in the reader's raind a strong impression that Mrs. McGinnis is thoroughly dead. And yet, over here in the twenty-second chapter, you make a man named Thompson fall in love with her, and she is married to him, and she goes skipping around through the rest of the story as lively as a grasshopper, and you all the time alluding to Thompson as her second husband. You see that kind won't do. It excites remark. Readers complain about it." "Thunder ! you don't say I did that ? Well, now, do you know I was thinking all the time that it was Mr. McGinnis that I buried in the first chapter. I must have got them mixed up somehow." "And then," continued the Colonel, "when you introduce the hero, you mention that he has got but one arm, having lost the other in battle. But in chapter twelve you run him through a saw-mill by accident, and you mention that he lost au arm there, too. And yet in the nineteenth chapter you say, 'Adolph rusheil up to Mary, threw his arms abont her, and clasped her to his bosom;' and then you go to relate how he sat down at the piano in the soft moonlight, and played one of Beethoven's sonatas with sweet, poetic fervor.' Now the thinsf, you see, don't hang. Adolph couldn't possibly throw his arms around Mary, if one was buried on the field of battle, and the other was minced up in a saw-mill ; and he couldn't clasp her to his bosom unless he threw a lasso with his teeth and hauled her in by swallowing the slack rope. As for the piano - well, you know as well ag I do that an armless man can't play a Beethoven sonata unless he knows how to perform the instrument with his nose, and in that oase you insult the popular intelligence when you talk about 'sweet poetic fervor. I have my fingers on the public pulse, and I know they won't stand it." "Well, well," eaid Stack, "I don't know how I ever carne to " "Let me direct your attention to another incendiary matter," interrupted the ColoneL "In the first love scène between Adolph and - and - let me see what's her name - Mary - you say that her liquid blue eyes reste'd softly apon him as he povu forth the stoiy of bis love, and its azure was dimmed by a flood of happy tears." Well, sir, about twenty pages further on, where the villian insulta her, you observe that her black eyes flashed lightning at him, and seemed to scorch him where he stood. Now let me direct attention to the fact that, if the girl's eyes were blue, then then they couldn't be black ; and if you mean to convey the impression that she had one blue eye and one black eye, and she had only looked softly at Adolph out of the off eye, while the near one roamed around, not doing any thingin particular, why, she is no phenomena for a novel, and only suitable for a place in the menagerie by the eide of the fat woman. And then you say that, although her eyes were liquid, yet it ' soorched the villian ! People won't put up with that kind of thing. It make 'em delirious and murderous. " "Too bad," said Stack. "I forgot what I said about her eyes, when I wrote that scène with the villain. "And here in the twentieth chapter, you say that Magruderwas stabbed with a bowie-knife in the hands of the Spaniard ; and in the next chapter you give an account of the post-mortem examination, and make the doctors hunt for the ballet and find it embedded in his liver. Even patiënt readers can't remain calm under such circumstances. They lose control of themselves." "It's very unfortunate," said Mr. Stack. "Now the way you manage the Browns in the story is also exasperating. First you represent Mrs. Brown as taking her twins around to church to be christened. In the middle of tbe book you make Mrs. Brown lament that she never had any children, and you wind up the story by bringing in Mrs. Brown with her grandson in hfir arms, just after having caused Mr. Brown to state to the clergyman that the only child he ever had died in his fourth year. Just think of the effect of such a tíiing on the public miud ! Why, this story would fill all the inaane asylums in the country." "Those Browns don't seem tö be very definite, somehow," said Stack, thoughtfully. "Worst of all," said the Colonel, "in chapter thirty-one you make the lovers resolve upon suicide, and you put them in a boat and drift them over Niágara Falls. Twelve chapters further on you suddenly introduce them walking in the twilight in a leafy lane, and, althoughafterwards she goes into a nunnery and takes the black veil, because he has been killed with pirates in the Spanish West Indies, in the next chapter to the last you have a scène where she goes to a surprise party at the Presbyterian minister's and finds him there making arrangements for the wedding as if nothing had ever happened ; and then, after you disclose the fact that she was a boy in disguise, and not a woman at all, you marry them to each other, and represent the boy heroine as giving her bleBsing to her daughter. O, it is awful thin I It won't do. It really won't. You'd better go into some other kind of business, Mr. Stack." Then Stack took his manusoript and went home to flx it up, so as to make it dovetail better. The Argus will not publish it. -