Of all the ways of acquiring money to which the millions bend their best energies, that of literature is the most forlorn. The artificers of necessaries and luxuries, for the animal existence, have the world as their customers; but those who labor for the mind have but a limited few, and therefore the supply of mental work is infinitely greater than the demand, and thousands of the unknown and struggling, even though possessed of much genius, must sink before the famous few who monopolize the literary market, and so the young writer is overlooked. He may be starving, but his manuscripts will be returned to him; the emoluments of literature are flowing in other channels; he is one added to the thousands too many in the writing world; his efforts may bring him misery and madness, but not money.
The door of the room opened, and a woman entered; and advancing near the little table on which the young man was writing, she fixed her eyes on him with a look in which anger, and the extreme wretchedness which merges on insanity, were mingled. She seemed nearly fifty; her features had some remaining traces of former regularity and beauty, but her whole countenance now was a volume filled with the most squalid suffering and evil passions; her cheeks and eyes were hollow, as if she had reached the extreme of old age; she was emaciated to a woeful degree; her dress was poor dirty, and tattered, and worn without any attempt at proper arrangement.
"Writing! writing! writing! Thank God, Andrew Carson, the pen will soon drop from your fingers with starvation."
The woman said this in a half-screaming, but weak and broken-down voice.
"Mother, let me have some peace," said the young writer, turning his face away, so that he might not see her red glaring eyes fixed on him.
"Ay, Andrew Carson, I say thank God that the force of hunger will soon now make you drop that cursed writing. Thank God, if there _is_ the God that my father used to talk about in the long nights in the bonnie highland glen, where it's like a dream of lang syne that I ever lived."
She pressed her hands on her breast, as if some recollections of an overpowering nature were in her soul.
"The last rag in your trunk has gone to the pawn; you have neither shirt, nor coat, nor covering now, except what you've on. Write--write--if you can, without eating; to-morrow you'll have neither meat nor drink here, nor aught now to get money on."