Read it through once

At home, eight or ten years ago, I tried to creep in under shelter of an authority grave enough to protect the article from ridicule—the _North American Review_. But Mr. Metcalf was too wary for me. He said that to treat these mere ‘coincidences’ seriously was a thing which the _Review_ couldn’t dare to do; that I must put either my name or my _nom de plume_ to the article, and thus save the _Review_ from harm. But I couldn’t consent to that; it would be the surest possible way to defeat my desire that the public should receive the thing seriously, and be willing to stop and give it some fair degree of attention. So I pigeon-holed the MS., because I could not get it published anonymously.