Counsel for the Defense

This is a story about literary criticism. The room was thick with dust and draped with ancient cobwebs. In one corner dismally reposed a literary junk heap old magazines, broken backed works of reference, novels once unanimously read but now unanimously forgotten. The desk was a helter skelter of papers. One of the two chairs had its burst cane seat mended by an atlas of the world; and wherever any of the floor peered dimly through the general débris it showed a complexion of dark and ineradicable greasiness. Altogether, it was a room hopelessly unfit for human habitation; which is perhaps but an indirect manner of stating that it was the office of the editor of a successful newspaper. Before a typewriter at a small table sat a bare armed, solitary man. He was twenty eight or thirty, abundantly endowed with bone and muscle, and with a face But not to soil this early page with abusive terms, it will be sufficient to remark that whatever the Divine Sculptor had carved his countenance to portray, plainly there had been no thought of re beautifying the earth with an Apollo.