I have been greatly amused quite recently by two little items that were
printed in one of those short-lived magazinelets. One article was by
Neith Boyce and the other by Emma Eggleson, both of which ladies are
subscribers to _The Homely Ladies Journal_. If I am not mistaken one of
these ladies raised a club for the _Journal_ (not at it), and when Mr.
Curtis and me offered to send her abroad to be educated, the amusing fact
was discovered that she already had a lovely education.
But the articles that amused me so much were about the penchant of
editors to monkey with manuscript. Both articles were on the same theme,
but the article by Neith Boyce was the longest. As Mr. Howells has not
improperly spoken of one of Neith Boyce’s short stories as a crackerjack,
and as this master of letters has also referred to a poem by Emma
Eggleson as hotstuff, I feel that I am justified in saying that both of
these ladies are arriving successward in the merry and dizzy field of
literature very rapidly.
I have sometimes thought in my thoughtful way that the reason an editor
is called by that appellation is because he loves to edit. A young
literary aspirant told me of a case in point the other day. He wrote a
lovely triolet which was accepted on its seventeenth trip by a paper
which shall be nameless. When he sent it out it ran thus: