Just what he saw as he passed along! What he saw--this common-looking, half-educated little person, with only the burning eyes and sensitive mouth to redeem him from utter insignificance! Truly this was a strange finger which opened the eyes of some and kept sealed the eyelids of others! For fifteen years this very cultivated gentleman who sat in the sub-editor's chair and drew his two thousand a year, had driven his pen along the scholarly way, and all that he had written, beside this untidy-looking document, had not in it a single germ of the things that count.
"Well ?" Burton asked, with ill-concealed eagerness.
The sub-editor was, after all, a man.

He set his teeth and came back to the present.
"My readers will, I am sure, find your little article quite interesting," he said calmly.

"We shall be glad to accept it, and anything else you may send us in the same vein.

You have an extraordinary gift for description." Burton drew a long sigh of relief.
"Thank you," he said.

"How much shall you pay me for it ?" The sub-editor estimated the length of the production.