Meeson, Addison, and Roscoe?
"And to think," as the Mighty Meeson himself would say, with a lordly
wave of his right hand, to some astonished wretch of an author whom he
has chosen to overwhelm with the sight of this magnificence, "to think
that all this comes out of the brains of chaps like you! Why, young man,
I tell you that if all the money that has been paid to you scribblers
since the days of Elizabeth were added together it would not come up to
my little pile; but, mind you, it ain't so much fiction that has done the
trick--it's religion. It's piety as pays, especially when it's printed."
Then the unsophisticated youth would go away, his heart too full for
words, but pondering how these things were, and by-and-by he would pass
into the Meeson melting-pot and learn something about it.
One day King Meeson sat in his counting house counting out his money, or,
at least, looking over the books of the firm. He was in a very bad
temper, and his heavy brows were wrinkled up in a way calculated to make
the counting-house clerks shake on their stools. Meeson's had a branch
establishment at Sydney, in Australia, which establishment had, until
lately, been paying--it is true not as well as the English one, but,
still, fifteen or twenty per cent.
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