But success had lost Martin's address, and her messengers no longer came to his door.

For twenty-five days, working Sundays and holidays, he toiled on "The Shame of the Sun," a long essay of some thirty thousand words.

It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism of the Maeterlinck school--an attack from the citadel of positive science upon the wonder- dreamers, but an attack nevertheless that retained much of beauty and wonder of the sort compatible with ascertained fact.

It was a little later that he followed up the attack with two short essays, "The Wonder- Dreamers" and "The Yardstick of the Ego." And on essays, long and short, he began to pay the travelling expenses from magazine to magazine.
During the twenty-five days spent on "The Shame of the Sun," he sold hack- work to the extent of six dollars and fifty cents.

A joke had brought in fifty cents, and a second one, sold to a high-grade comic weekly, had fetched a dollar.