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 lover some bright, moony night, it would be sure to go into a cloud."

"You needn't dwell so much on that, for mine is not intended for a love story."

"I'd like to see you write one that wan't. It would pop in some how, just as it has into your'n at the beginnin'. Don't you 'spose I could see through that Mr. Melrose, what was first in your mind, whether you meant it or not. Folks don't see alabaster necks without a cause, I reckon."

"I shan't have that in. I want something more sensible and dignified. There's too much of such trash written already for the benefit of young people."

"I guess if you don't have any thing in but what's goin' to benefit somebody, a pretty lean kind of a mess you'd have of it, but you want some poetry to start with, and I've got some for the first chapter. You know you want a place to lay your siege."

"Scene, you mean."

"No, that's what I call a siege. I 'spose you think I don't know what that means.

"Butter made of skim-milk! Couldn't you "have gone a little wider of the mark?"

"No matter, that'll do for a play of the fancy, and sounds rich, as if we could almost taste the melted butter and molasses runnin'. And then it makes a kind of a puzzle whether lasses means molasses or country girls.

Now I've thought of a capital character to last you all the way through. Ben Sykes, or, as he was al-