IN due course of time, I having performed my portion of the contract, it became the duty of the two editors to fulfill their agreement with me. Every day for ten days I had been turning in the cash for from five to fifteen books, thereby establishing my reputation for industry and sobriety. Mr. Gissel was very anxious to know at the end of each day whom I had seen and how the mention of his name was received. Instead of telling him of the many who laughed or sniffed or bought to get rid of me gracefully, I gave him flattering reports. Lately, by way of reward I presume, he had taken to reading to me the cleverest passages in his editorials. Mr. Sullivan, the city editor, confided to me one day that he was from a small town in central Illinois not unlike the Warsaw from which I hailed, and which I then roughly and jestingly sketched to him, and from then on we were on fairly good terms. He dug up a number of poems and granted me the favor of reading them. Some of them were almost as good as similar ones by Whittier and Bryant, after whom they were obviously modeled. Today I know them to be bad, or mediocre; then I thought they were excellent and grieved to think that any one should be going to make a reputation as a great poet, while I, the only real poet extant (although I had done nothing as yet to prove it), remained unrecognized. I did not know until later that I might not have secured a place even now, so numerous were the applications of clever and experienced newspaper men, had it not been for the influence of my friend Maxwell. For one reason or another, my errant youth perhaps, my crazy persistence and general ignorance of things journalistic, he had become interested in me and seemed fairly anxious to see me get a start. Out of the tail of his eye he had been watching. When I arrived of an evening and there was no one present he sometimes inquired what I was doing, and by degrees, although I had been cautioned not to tell, he extracted the whole story of Gissel’s book. I even loaned him a copy of the book, which he read and pronounced rot, adding: “They ought to be ashamed of themselves, sending you out on a job of this kind. You’re better than that.” As the end of my task drew near and I was dreading another uncertain wait, he put in a good word for me. But even then I doubt if I should have had a trial had it not been for the convention which was rapidly drawing near. On the day the newspapers were beginning to chronicle the advance arrival of various leaders from all parts of the country, I was taken on at fifteen dollars a week, for a week or two anyhow, and assigned to watch the committee rooms in the hotels Palmer, Grand Pacific, Auditorium and Richelieu. There was another youth who was set to work with me on this, and he gave me some slight instruction. Over us was the political man, who commanded other men in different hotels and whose presence I had only noted when the convention was nearly over.