Animals were an abiding interest with _McClure’s_. Rudyard Kipling laid the foundation in the Jungle tales. After that great series few were the numbers that did not have an animal in text and picture. It was as much a passion as baseball was to become in the latter days with _The American Magazine_. I spent a lively month visiting zoos, interviewing animal trainers and hunters and keepers, buying books and photographs, turning in what I considered a pretty good grist of materials and suggestions. What became of it, I never knew, for I never heard a word of it after I came back to America. The only remnant I have now of that month is a powder box of Dresden china bought at the showrooms of the factory of the crossed swords, it being my practice when on professional trips to use my leisure seeing the town, guidebook in hand, and buying all the souvenirs my purse permitted. It was in 1906 that Mr. McClure brought home from one of his foraging expeditions the plan which was eventually to wreck his enterprises. He had it cut and dried ready to put into action. Without consultation with his partners he had organized a new company, the charter of which provided not only for a _McClure’s Universal Journal_, but a McClure’s Bank, a McClure’s Life Insurance Company, a McClure’s School Book Publishing Company, and later a McClure’s Ideal Settlement in which people could have cheap homes on their own terms. It undertook to combine with a cheap magazine—which it goes without saying was to have an enormous circulation with the enormous advertising which circulation brings—an attempt to solve some of the great abuses of the day, abuses at which we had been hammering in _McClure’s Magazine_. He proposed to do this by giving them a competition which would draw their teeth. By the time Mr. McClure got around to explaining his plan to me and asking my cooperation he had worked himself up to regarding it as an inspiration which must not be questioned. It seemed to me to possess him like a religious vision which it was blasphemy to question. Obsessed as he was, he was blind and deaf to the obstacles in the way. I am sure I hurt Mr. McClure by telling him bluntly and at once that I would never have anything to do with such a scheme. In a recently published letter Lincoln Steffens tells how he saw Mr. McClure’s plan. To him it was not only “fool” but “not quite right.” Certainly it was not right. As organized, it was a speculative scheme as alike as two peas to certain organizations the magazine had been battering.