Nosing about the city in an inquiring way and dreaming half-formed dreams of one and another thing I would like to do, it finally came to me, dimly, like a bean that strains at its enveloping shell, that I would like to write of these things. It would be interesting, so I thought, to describe a place like Goose Island in the Chicago River, a mucky and neglected realm then covered with shanties made of upturned boats sawed in two, and yet which seemed to me the height of the picturesque; also a building like the Auditorium or the Masonic Temple, that vast wall of masonry twenty-two stories high and at that time actually the largest building in the world; or a seething pit like that of the Board of Trade, which I had once visited and which astonished and fascinated me as much as anything ever had. That roaring, yelling, screaming whirlpool of life! And then the lake, with its pure white sails and its blue water; the Chicago River, with its black, oily water, its tall grain elevators and black coal pockets; the great railroad yards, covering miles and miles of space with their cars. How wonderful it all was! As I walked from place to place collecting I began betimes to improvise rhythmic, vaguely formulated word-pictures or rhapsodies anent these same and many other things—free verse, I suppose we should call it now—which concerned everything and nothing but somehow expressed the seething poetry of my soul and this thing to me. Indeed I was crazy with life, a little demented or frenzied with romance and hope. I wanted to sing, to dance, to eat, to love. My word-dreams and maunderings concerned my day, my age, poverty, hope, beauty, which I mouthed to myself, chanting aloud at times. Sometimes, because on a number of occasions I had heard the Reverend Frank W. Gunsaulus and his like spout rocket-like sputterings on the subjects of life and religion, I would orate, pleading great causes as I went. I imagined myself a great orator with thousands of people before me, my gestures and enunciation and thought perfect, poetic, and all my hearers moved to tears or demonstrations of wild delight. After a time I ventured to commit some of these things to paper, scarcely knowing what they were, and in a fever for self-advancement I bundled them up and sent them to Eugene Field. In his column and elsewhere I had read about geniuses being occasionally discovered by some chance composition or work noted by one in authority. I waited for a time, with great interest but no vast depression, to see what my fate would be. But no word came and in time I realized that they must have been very bad and had been dropped into the nearest waste basket. But this did not give me pause nor grieve me. I seethed to express myself. I bubbled. I dreamed. And I had a singing feeling, now that I had done this much, that some day I should really write and be very famous into the bargain.