My dear boy, I never said I could write one--in fact, I am very sure I couldn’t; it’s all I can do to read them after the other people have written them. That is an infirmity which has, I am sure, interfered seriously with my labors as a critic--this inability to wade through everything that the magazine editors are kind enough to set before us. But I contrive to keep in touch with contemporary fiction by frequenting the Mercantile Library, where I can not only read and write undisturbed, but also take note of what others are reading and writing. And toward the close of each month I make it a point to arrive very early of a morning and take a superficial glance at the pages of the different periodicals, in order to gain an idea of the relative popularity of each one, and of the stories which they contain. When I find a story that is smeared with the grime of innumerable hands, or a magazine that has been torn almost to shreds by scores of eager readers, I retire to a corner and try to find out the cause of all the trouble.
But this labor-saving system, excellent as it is in many ways, has its defects; and so it happened that I came very near missing one of the most charming stories that I have ever found in the pages of a magazine.
One bleak autumnal morning not many years ago I paid one of my periodical early visits to the library, and had just finished my examination of the literary market when my eye happened to fall on the name of François Coppée printed in about the last place in the world that one would be apt to look for it--namely, in the table of contents of _Harper’s Magazine_. It was signed to a story called “The Rivals,” and although the pages of that story were neither torn by nervous feminine claws nor blackened by grimy hands I began to read it, and as I read New York slipped away from me, the wheezing of the asthmatic patrons of the library became inaudible to me, for I was in Paris with the young poet and his two loves. When I had finished the book I looked up and saw that I was still in the library, for there were the shelves full of what are termed the “leading periodicals of the day,” and two elderly ladies were racing across the room for the new number of _Life_.