"There's your story!" he exclaimed. "The poetic side of packing! Don't write about the slaughter-houses. Dwell on daintiness--pretty girls in white caps--everything shining and clean! Don't you see that's the way to make your story original?" Of course I saw it at once. Original? Why, original is no name for it! I could never have conceived such originality! It isn't in me! I should no more have thought of writing only of pretty girls and pretty cans, after witnessing those bloody scenes, than of describing the battle at Liège in terms of polish used on soldiers' buttons. But original as the idea is, you perceive I have not used it. I could not bear to. He thought of it first. It belonged to him. If I used it, the originality would not be mine, but his. So I have deliberately written the story in my own hackneyed way. CHAPTER XIV THE HONORABLE HINKY DINK Has it ever struck you that our mental attitude toward famous men varies in this respect: that while we think of some of them as human beings with whom we might conceivably shake hands and have a chat, we think of others as legendary creatures, strange and remote--beings hardly to be looked upon by human eyes? Some years since, in the courtyard of a hotel in Paris, I met a friend of mine. He was hurrying in the direction of the bar. "Come on," he beckoned. "There are some people here you'll want to meet." I followed him in and to a table at which two men were seated. One proved to be Alfred Sutro; the other Maurice Maeterlinck. To meet Mr. Sutro was delightful, but it was conceivable. Not so Maeterlinck. To shake hands with him, to sit at the same table, to see that he wore a black coat, a stiff collar (it was too large for him), a black string tie, a square-crowned derby hat; to see him seated in a bar sipping beer like any man--that was not conceivable. I sat there speechless, trying to convince myself of what I saw. "That man over there is actually Maeterlinck!" I kept assuring myself. "I am looking at Maeterlinck! Now he nods the head in which 'The Bluebird' was conceived. Now he lifts his beer glass in the hand which indited 'Monna Vanna!'" Nor was my amazement due entirely to the surprise of meeting a much-admired man. It was due, most of all, to a feeling which I must have had--although I was never before conscious of it--a feeling that no such man as Maeterlinck existed in reality; that he was a purely legendary being; a figure in white robes and sandals, harping and singing in some Elysian temple. * * * * * I experienced a somewhat similar emotion in Chicago on being introduced to Hinky Dink. In saying that, I do not mean to be irreverent. I only mean that I had always thought of Hinky Dink as a fictitious personage. He and his colleague, Bathhouse John, have figured in my mind as a pair of absurd, imaginary figures, such as might have been invented by some whimsical son of a comic supplement like Winsor McCay.