Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE first thing the author did, on opening the door of the Studio, was to look at the clock. Big Bill pointed to but five minutes of eleven. Good! There remained a clean hour and a half before he would have to cease work and go to bed, to wake up a private tutor. All the lethargy of the earlier evening seemed to have vanished now, under the strong reverse stimulus of the Redman- tle Club. Having turned up the light in his gas-lamp, the young man stood a moment, thinking intently, and then sat down at his writing-table. The table was twelve years old, and had been to college and law-school. It was worn and stained, but still strong, and bore up, besides the lamp and clock, not only a large array of writer's paraphernalia, but a considerable floating miscellany, too, including a clipping or so, several unanswered letters, a stray tobacco-pouch, a thick exercise-book, and the particular volume on Women he happened to be reading at the moment. Ignoring these, the proprietor drew from the back of his table drawer a capacious brown-paper folder, and from the folder plucked three typewritten sheets, held together with a clip. It was seen that the topmost of these sheets bore a heading: Mary Wing. And for some moments the author of them sat in stillness, conning over the lines that followed: the magnanimous lines he had prepared with such pains long ago, and then tamely put to sleep in a drawer. He had composed this eulogy last winter, to help Miss Wing in her campaign for the assistant principalship of theHigh School. His plan, of which she knew nothing to this day, had been cunning and complete. First he would get this "write-up" into the "Persons in the Foreground" department of "Willcox's," the famous and enormously circulated weekly; then he would have the "Post" repr...