I had come, I said, on a long and weary journey to the home of my only female relative, and here I threw into the letter some reference to the fact that I was an orphan. “Imagine,” I wrote, “the sorrow and desolation in my heart at finding the house unoccupied and the windows boarded up.” It was there, sitting in the hotel at Madison, Wisconsin, with the pen in my hand, that I made my fortune. Something bold and heroic came into my mood and, without a moment’s hesitation, I mentioned in my letter what should never be mentioned to a woman, unless she be an elderly woman of one’s own family, and then only by a physician perhaps—I spoke of my aunt’s breasts, using the plural. I had hoped, I said, to lay my tired head on her breasts. To tell the truth I had become drunken with words and now, how glad I am that I did. Mr. George Moore, Clive Bell, Paul Rosenfeld, and others of the most skillful writers of our English speech, have written a great deal about painters and, as I have already explained, there was not a book or magazine article in English and concerning painters, their lives and works, procurable in Chicago, I had not read. What I am now striving to convey to you is something of my own pride in my literary effort in the hotel at Madison, Wisconsin, and surely, if I was, at that moment an artist, no other artist has ever had such quick and wholehearted recognition. Having spoken of putting my tired head on my aunt’s breasts (poor woman, she died, never having seen me) I went on to give the general impression—which by the way was quite honest and correct—of a somewhat boyish figure, rather puzzled, wandering in a confused way through life. The imaginary but correct enough figure of myself, born at the moment in my imagination, had made its way through dismal swamps of gloom, over the rough hills of adversity and through the dry deserts of loneliness, toward the one spot in all this world where it had hoped to find rest and peace—that is to say upon the bosom of its aunt. However, as I have already explained, being a thorough modern and full of the modern boldness, I did not use the word bosom, as an old-fashioned writer might have done. I used the word breasts. When I had finished writing tears were in my eyes. The letter I wrote on that day covered some seven sheets of hotel paper—finely written to the margins—and cost four cents to mail. “Shall I mail it or shall I not?” I said to myself as I came out of the hotel office and stood before a mail box. The letter was balanced between my finger and thumb. “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, Catch a nigger by the toe.”