All reasonable young authors feel this way after their first draught at the soul-satisfying spring of publicity.  It is only that preposterous young person who was born tired who fails to experience the sensations that were Partington’s that week; and at the end of the week, again like the reasonable young author, he began to realize that immortality could not be gained by one story treating of a fictitious Tommy and an imaginary huckleberry-tree, and so he sat himself down at his desk once more, resolved this time to clinch himself, as it were, in the public mind, with a tale of “Jimmie and the Strawberry-mine.”  This story did not come as easily as the other.  In fact, Partington found it impossible to write more than a third of the second tale that night.  He couldn’t bring his mind down to it exactly, probably because his mind had been soaring so high since the publication of his first effusion.  For diversion as much as for anything else during a lull in his flow of language he penned a short letter to the editor of Nursery Days, and announced his intention to send the story of “Jimmie and the Strawberry-mine” to him shortly—­which was unfortunate.  If he had finished the story first and then sent it, it might have been good enough to convince the editor against his judgment that he ought to have it.  A concrete story can often accomplish more than an abstract idea.  In this event it could not have accomplished less, anyhow, for the editor promptly replied that he did not care for a second story of that nature.  There was no particular evidence in hand, he said, that the children liked stories of that kind particularly, adding that the first was only an experiment that it was not necessary to repeat, and so on; polite, but unmistakably valedictory.

“No evidence in hand that they are liked, eh?  Well, how on earth, I wonder,” Partington said, angrily, to himself, “do they ever find evidence that things are liked?  Do they go about asking subscribers, or what?”

And then he picked up the issue of Nursery Days that had started him along on his way to immortality, to console himself, at all events, with the sight of his published story.  In turning over the leaves of the periodical his eye fell upon a page across the top of which ran a highly ornate cut which indicated that there was printed the “Post-office Department of Nursery Days,” on perusing which Partington found a number of communications and editorial responses like these: 

I.

“Dear postmaster,—­I have been taking Nursery Days since Christmas, so I thought I would write you a letter.  My birthday came a week ago Thursday.  I received a watch and chain, a glove-buttoner, a penknife, and a set of ivory jackstraws.  We have a cat at home whose name is Rumpelstiltzken.  He is very sleepy, and sleeps all day.  He always picks out the most comfortable chair, and then feels very much injured if we turn him out.  I like Bolivar Wiggins’s story in your last paper very much.  Are you going to have any more stories by Bolivar Wiggins?

  “Your little friend,
  “Helen CHECKERBY, aged seven.