It occurred to me that this last suggestion of the Landlady was worth
considering by the soft-handed, broadcloth-clad spouters to the laboring
classes,--so called in distinction from the idle people who only contrive
the machinery and discover the processes and lay out the work and draw
the charts and organize the various movements which keep the world going
and make it tolerable. The organ-blower works harder with his muscles,
for that matter, than the organ player, and may perhaps be exasperated
into thinking himself a downtrodden martyr because he does not receive
the same pay for his services.
I will not pretend that it needed the Landlady's sagacious guess about
the Young Astronomer and his pupil to open my eyes to certain
possibilities, if not probabilities, in that direction. Our Scheherezade
kept on writing her stories according to agreement, so many pages for so
many dollars, but some of her readers began to complain that they could
not always follow her quite so well as in her earlier efforts. It seemed
as if she must have fits of absence. In one instance her heroine began as
a blonde and finished as a brunette; not in consequence of the use of any
cosmetic, but through simple inadvertence. At last it happened in one of
her stories that a prominent character who had been killed in an early
page, not equivocally, but mortally, definitively killed, done for, and
disposed of, reappeared as if nothing had happened towards the close of
her narrative.
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