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went anywhere without keeping his eyes open for the anticipated messiah.

He was greatly taken by broad primitive effects: when he noticed that a Chicago daily always called itself "The World's Greatest Newspaper" he was marvellously struck by the power of this slogan, and lamented that he had not thought of it first. The question as to whether the slogan were true or not never occurred to him. He liked to have the keynote sentences in the leading editorial emphasized in blackface type, so that there might be no danger of any one's missing the point. Desiring for his beloved sheet "this man's art and that man's scope," as the sonnet puts it, every now and then he thought he had discovered the prodigy, and some new feature would be added to the paper at outrageous expense, only to be quietly shovelled out six months or a year later. In the meantime, the auditor was growing very gray, and even Mr. Birdlip's quick blue eye was sometimes hazed with faint perplexity when he studied the circulation charts. Perhaps it would have been kinder if someone could have told him that a boyhood spent in splitting infinitives is not sufficient training for one to become an Abraham Lincoln of the newspaper business.

As he trotted in and out of the Lens office,