"Did you ever read," he wrote, "Turgenieff's _Fathers and Sons_? I know that you didn't and therefore I know what a treat you have coming. I'll send you the book if you can't get it in Macochee, and I presume you can't. Snider's sign 'Drugs and Books' is a lure to deceive an unwary public that doesn't care as much for books as it does for soda-water; and the stock there, as I recall it, consists largely of forty-cent editions of books on which the copyright has expired, and which, printed on cheap, pulp paper, are to be introduced for the first time to the natives of Macochee. I wish you could see Weston's little book-case, with its rows of his favorites. Besides Turgenieff and Tolstoi--he says the Russians are the greatest novel writers the world has yet produced--he has all of George Eliot; I have just read over again _Middlemarch_ and _Daniel Deronda_. He likes Jane Austen, too, and he says you would like her; I haven't read any but _Emma_ as yet. I'm going to read them all. And if you like, you can read the set of little volumes I am sending you to-day; we can read them thus together. And Henry James--do read him--_Daisy Miller_ especially; you will like that. Besides these, Weston has most of Ibsen's plays, and sometimes he reads parts of them aloud to me; he reads them well. Some day, he says, he's going to write a play himself; he is fond of the theater, and we often go. One of the fine things about being on a newspaper is that we get theater tickets, though we can't always get tickets to the theater we want. Now and then the dramatic editor--a fine old fellow with a magnificent shock of white hair, who may be seen about the office late at night looking very _distingué_ in his evening clothes--gets Weston to write a criticism on some play; and often the literary editor lets him review books. Weston said to-day he'd get the literary editor to let me review some books, and when I told him I didn't know how, he laughed in a strange way and said that wouldn't make the slightest difference. There's another book you _must_ read, and that is _A Modern Instance_. The chief character is Bartley Hubbard, a newspaper man. Weston and I had a big argument about the character to-day. I said I thought it was a libel on the newspaper profession and Weston laughed and said it was only the truth, and that I'd agree with him after I'd been in the work longer. 'Newspaper work isn't a profession anyway,' he said, 'but a business.' He speaks of journalism--though he won't call it journalism, nor let me--just as lawyers speak of the law. He is urging me, by the way, to keep up my law studies, and I'm thinking of going to the law school here, if I find I can carry it on with my other work. Weston declares I can; he says a man has to carry water on both shoulders if he wants to amount to anything in the world--Wade Powell said something like that to me once. Weston says I'll want to get out of newspaper work after a while. He disturbed me a little to-day, and he hurt me, too, by saying that a newspaper man has no business to be married; and he knows all about you, too. Of course, he didn't mean to hurt me, it's merely his way of looking at things."