sufficient reasons, and I am not going to be fool enough to set my judgment up against theirs. In other words, I lack the nerve to go ahead and write as I feel. I prefer to study past successes, with the result that I am moderately successful only. It's the same way in every line of business. Precedent guides in all things, but where occasionally you find a man courageous enough to cast precedent to the winds, one of two things happens. Either fortune or ruin follows. Hence, the thing to do if you want to make a fortune is to eliminate the possibility of ruin as far as may be. You cannot ruin a man who has nothing. He is down on bed-rock, anyhow; so for a receipt for fortune I should say, start a pauper, show your nerve, and you'll make a pile, or you won't make a pile. If you make it you are fortunate. If you fail to make it you are no more unfortunate than you were before you started."

"For plausibility, Mr. Idiot," said Mr. Pedagog, "you are to me a perfect wonder. I do not think that any one can deny, with confidence born of certainty, the truth of your premises, and it must be admitted that your conclusions are based properly upon those premises, and yet your conclusions are almost invariably utterly absurd, if not absolutely grotesque. Here is a man who says, to make a fortune become a beggar!"

"Precisely," said the Idiot. "There is nothing like having a clean slate to work on. If you are not a beggar you have something, and having something promotes caution and tends to destroy nerve. As a beggar you have everything to gain and nothing to lose, so you can plunge. You can swim better in deep water than in the shallow."

"Well," said the Doctor, "enlighten us on this point. You may not know how to show nerve as a writer—in fact, you confess that you don't. How would you show nerve as a beggar? Would you strive to enforce your demands and degenerate into a common highwayman, or would you simply go in for big profits, and ask passers-by for ten dollars instead of ten cents?"

"He'd probably take a bag of dynamite into a millionaire's office and threaten to blow him to pieces if he didn't give him a house and lot," sneered the Bibliomaniac.

"Not at all," said the Idiot. "That's cowardice, not nerve. If I went into a millionaire's office and demanded a million—or a house and lot even—armed with a bag full of newspapers, pretending it held dynamite, it might be more like nerve; but my beggar would do nothing contrary to the law. He'd simply be nervy, that's all—cheeky, perhaps you'd call it. For instance, I believe that if I were to 

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