The Booming of Acre Hill | Page 8

of his great
literary success, and his friends and neighbors prophesied great things
for him. Yet nothing has since come from his pen, and many have
wondered why.

Thanks to Mr. Smithers himself I am enabled to make public the story
of his sudden withdrawal from the ranks of the immortals when on the
very threshold of the temple of fame.
Ten years have changed his point of view materially, and an experience
that once seemed tragedy to him is now in his eyes sufficiently tinged
with comedy, and his own position among us is so secure that he is
willing that the story of his failure should go forth.
After trying many professions Smithers had become a man of schemes.
He devised plans that should enrich other people. Unfortunately, he
sold these to other people on a royalty basis, and so failed to grow rich
himself. If he had only sold his plans outright and collected on the spot
he might sometime have made something; but this he did not do, and as
a consequence he rarely made anything that was at all considerable, and
finally, to keep the wolf out of his dining-room, he was forced to take
up poetry, that being in his estimation the last as well as the easiest
resource of a well-ordered citizen.
"I always threatened to take up poetry when all else had failed me," he
said to himself; "therefore I will now proceed to take up poetry.
Writing is purely manual labor, anyhow. Given a pad, a pencil, and
perseverance--three very important p's--and I can produce a fourth, a
poem, in short order. Sorry I didn't get to the end of my other ropes
before, now that I think of it."
And so he sat down and took up poetry.
He put it down again, however, very quickly.
"Dear me!" he ejaculated. "Now, who'd have thought that? Here I have
the pencil and the pad and the perseverance, but I'm hanged if the poem
is quite as easy as I had supposed. These little conceits aren't so easy to
write, after all, even when they contain no ideas. Of course, it isn't hard
to say:
"'Sweet month of May, time of the violet wild, The dandelion golden,
and the mild Ethereal sweetness of the blossoming trees, The soft

suggested calor of the breeze, The ruby-breasted robin on the lawn, The
thrushes piping sweetly at the dawn, The gently splashing waters by the
weir, The rose- and lilac-laden atmosphere'--
"because, after all, it's nothing but a catalogue of the specialties of May;
but how the dickens to wind the thing up is what puzzles me. It's too
beautiful and truly poetic to be spoiled by a completing couplet like:
"'And in the distant dam the croaking frog Completes, O May, thy
wondrous catalogue.'
"Nobody would take a thing like that--and pay for it; but what else can
be said? What do the violets wild, the dandelion, the ruby-breasted
robin, and the lilac-laden atmosphere and other features all do, I'd like
to know? What one of many verbs--oh, tut! Poetry very evidently is not
in my line, after all. I'll turn the vials of my vocabulary upon
essay-writing."
Which Partington, as his friends called him, proceeded at once to do.
He applied himself closely to his desk for one whole morning, and
wrote a very long paper on "The Tendency of the Middle Ages
Towards Artificialism." Hardly one of the fifteen thousand words
employed by him in the construction of this paper held fewer than five
syllables, and one or two of them got up as high as ten, a fact which led
Partington to think that the editor of the South American Quarterly
Review ought at least to have the refusal of it. Apparently the editor of
the South American Quarterly Review was only too eager to have the
refusal of it, because he refused it, or so Partington observed in
confidence to an acquaintance, in less time than it could possibly have
taken him to read it. After that the essay became emulous of men like
Stanley and Joe Cook. It became a great traveller, but never failed to
get back in safety to its fond parent, Richard Partington Smithers, as
our hero now called himself. Finally, Partington did manage to realize
something on his essay--that is to say, indirectly--for after "The
Tendency of the Middle Ages Towards Artificialism" had gone the
rounds of all the reviews, monthlies, dailies, and weeklies in the
country, its author pigeon-holed it, and, stringing together the printed
slips it had brought back to him upon the various occasions of its return,

he sent these under the head of "How Editors Reject" to an evening
journal in Boston, whose readers could know nothing of the subject, for
reasons that are