Saturday is a half holiday at Mr. McClure’s village of Syndicate. On that day the noon whistle means complete cessation of work, as it always has in every one of the departments of Mr. McClure’s great enterprise.

On the occasion of a recent Saturday visit to this model settlement I found scores of well-fed, happy-looking prosers and poets riding their bicycles up and down the village street or sitting in rows on the fence rails eagerly discussing the condition of the literary market and the business prospects for the coming year. In the large playground which lies to[Pg 317] the north of the village an exciting game of football was in progress between two picked elevens, one selected from the various “reminiscence-of-celebrities” gangs employed about the works, and the other made up from the day shift of “two-rhyme-to-the-quatrain” poets.

The Scotch dialect authors were seated on the piazza in front of their quarters, mending their shoes, washing their clothes, and preparing in other ways for the impending “Sawbath.” Mr. McClure tells me that they are very shy and suspicious, and refuse to mingle socially with the other hands. One of them, Dr. Bawbee MacFudd, was confined to his room with brain fever, the result of having been asked to spend something the last time he went out of the house.

Just beyond the barn devoted to the Scotchmen Mr. McClure showed me a building which he erected last spring and which is now used as a canning factory[Pg 318] and warehouse for the storage of perishable goods.

“You see,” said Mr. McClure, “we are doing a very large business here, and supplying not only my own magazine and newspaper syndicate with matter, but also various other publications, which I cannot name for obvious reasons, so it frequently happens that we find ourselves at the close of some holiday season with a number of poems, stories, or essays relating to that particular holiday left on our hands. These ‘perishable goods,’ as we call them in the trade, were formerly a total loss, but now we can and preserve them until the holiday comes round again.”

Mr. McClure directed my attention to the wooden shelves which encircled the main room of the building, and which contained long rows of neat tin cans and glass jars, hermetically sealed and appropriately labelled. In the Thanksgiving[Pg 319] department were to be found cans containing comic turkey dinners in prose and verse, “First Thanksgiving in America” stories of the old Plymouth Rock brand so popular in New England, serious verses designed for “Woman and Home” ............