Over next door, beyond the thick laurel hedge, on this same evening, Mr.

Sebastian Early, now that the last of his guests had withdrawn the

silken wonder of her reception skirts, was settling down to a quiet

evening with his turbaned guest.

Now Mr. Sebastian Early is far too intricate a person to be dismissed,

as Mrs. Lenox disposed of him, with a phrase and a laugh. In early life,

it is true, he had seemed a commonplace and insignificant young man. His

first appearance before the public was as the inventor of a

hook-and-eye, but his hook-and-eye had such unusual merits that it

seemed, according to the engaging pictures and verses in the

street-cars, to simplify most of the sterner problems of every-day life.

As its lineaments began to stare at passers-by from thousands of huge

bill-boards over the length and breadth of the land, dimes turned to

dollars in Mr. Early's ever-widening pockets, and for the time he felt

himself a man of distinction. Yet in these later and regenerate days,

Mr. Early sometimes had a moment's anguish as he remembered those miles

of unesthetic bill-boards, which once marred the meadows and streams of

his native land; for with a widening horizon, there had crept upon him a

rising spirit of discontent.

Perhaps it was that divine discontent, which William Morris celebrates,

that makes men yearn for higher things. Department stores still rolled

out their multitudinous cards of hooks-and-eyes, but the person of

Sebastian Early passed unnoticed in the crowd. He yearned for fame, not

for his product, but for himself, and the same ability that led him to

serve the wants of the public in hooks now drove him to study its social

demands. Like many another unfortunate, he began to perceive that

dollars alone were not enough of a key to unlock the magic door. In this

over-fed land, people with money are growing too common. Therefore to

gold one must add power and distinction, if one would keep one's head

above the herd. This must one do and not leave the other undone.

Sebastian determined to make himself interesting. The public has a

fawning respect for fame. One or two abortive attempts convinced Mr.

Early that his literary efforts would bring him not even the distinction

of infamy. At last he hit upon an idea. He would be a patron of the

Arts--not one of your little ordinary buyers, but a man whose purse was,

so to speak, regilded by mind. He spent six months of hard work as a

student of the situation and then he made his début. He selected a few

gems of half-forgotten eighteenth century literature--gems that deserved

to be given life-preservers on that stream of oblivion into which they

were too surely being sucked. These he brought forth in tiny volumes,

wide-edged and thick-papered, illuminated as to capitals and bound in

ooze or in old brocade on which were scattered a few decorations,

calculated, so unthinkable were they, to upset the reasoning power of

the average reader, and thus prepare him for the literary matter which

he should find within.




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