Guy Hammersley; or, Clearing his Name — page 166: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Ay! GUY HAMMERSLEY. 157 better, doesn’t it? Getting two things for the price of one, don’t you see ?” But Ward did not speak in a very confident tone. It was evident that the cold reception accorded his first effort affected him considerably. ‘I told you I hadn't smoothed off the rough edges yet,” he said, halfapologetically. ‘‘ You see that ‘a’ bothers me. It doesn’t come in the way it ought to.” It most certainly did not, and after twenty minutes’ steady thinking in the effort to subjugate it, poor Ward was forced to give up the attempt in despair, and with it all hope of utilizing Emperor as the text for his initial essay in the field of comic literature. ‘* But everything requires practice,” he tried to en- courage himself by reflecting. ‘‘ I got pretty near it that time. The next trial ought to end in success.” For the second attempt, he got up and began to walk up and down the little room, allowing his eyes to rove in every nook and corner of it. ‘Surely I ought to find something funny in a flat,” he mused. ‘‘ The papers have been full of squibs about them for years.” But that was the trouble of it. Every good idea on which he struck, he found, on second thought, to be the reminiscence of some bright bit he had already read in the papers, and after half an hour’s further trial, he threw down his pencil in disgust and went off to bed, thoroughly worn out, not to say dis- couraged. Gomicbooks (E(0) m =)