VII A Beggar's Hand-book

"Mr. Idiot," said the Poet one morning, as the waffles were served, "you are an inventive genius. Why don't you invent an easy way to make a fortune? The trouble with most methods of making money is that they involve too much labor."

"I have thought of that," said the Idiot. "And yet the great fortunes have been made in a way which involved very little labor, comparatively speaking. You, for instance, probably work harder over a yard of poetry that brings you in ten dollars than any of our great railroad magnates have over a mile of railroad which has brought them in a million."

"Which simply proves that it is ideas that count rather than labor," said the Poet.

"Not exactly," said the Idiot. "If you put a hundred ideas into a quatrain you will get less money for it than you would for a two-volume epic in which you have possibly only half an idea. It isn't idea so much as nerve that counts. The man who builds railroads doesn't advance any particular idea, but he shows lots of nerve, and it is nerve that makes wealth. I believe that if you literary men would show more nerve force and spare the public the infliction of what you call your ideas, you would make more money."

"How would you show nerve in writing?" queried the Bibliomaniac.

"If I knew I'd write and make my fortune," said the Idiot. "Unfortunately, I don't know how one can show nerve in writing, unless it be in taking hold of some particularly popular idiosyncrasy of mankind and treating it so contemptuously that every one would want to mob you. If you could get the public mad enough at you to want to mob you they'd read everything you'd write, simply to nourish their wrath, and you'd soon be cutting coupons for a living, and could then afford to take up more ideas—coupon-cutters can afford theories. For my own part, one reason why I do not myself take up literature for a profession is that I have neither the nerve nor the coupons. I'd probably run along in the rut like a majority of the writers of to-day, and wouldn't have the grit to strike out in a new line of my own. Men say, and perhaps very properly, this is the thing that has succeeded in the past. I'll do this. Something else that appears alluring enough in the abstract has never been done, and for that reason I won't do it. There have been clever men before me, men clever enough to think of this something that I fondly imagine is original, and they haven't done it. Doubtless they refrained from doing it for good and 

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