Stories of the South followed; other stories, too, of New York. The mere list of them, as they appear in the two books called “Back Home” and “The Escape of Mr. Trimm” is enough to bring thrills to every reader of fiction: The Belled Buzzard, An Occurrence up a Side Street, Another of Those Cub Reporter Stories, Smoke of Battle, The Exit of Anse Dugmore, Fishhead; Words and Music, Five Hundred Dollars Reward, Up Clay Street, The Mob from Massac, Black and White, and the rest.... “Words and Music,” the first story in “Back Home” might be used as a test for the Americanism of anybody. It’s a seditious, Confederate, Southern story, but anybody, Yank or Southerner, who doesn’t thrill to it, doesn’t feel all the old traditions of the real country when he reads it, is a fake-American, a person of hyphenation. Meanwhile, writing these slices of authentic genius, Cobb was not forgetting his humor, and he decorated the _Saturday Evening Post_ with improper references to stomachs and dentists and vittles and art, published in book form as “Cobb’s Anatomy,” and “Cobb’s Bill-of-Fare,” then with irreverent things about the tourists and real-estate artists from the Grand Canyon to San Francisco, published as “Roughing It De Luxe,” and still more irreverent things about the grand old game of doing the American tourist, published in “Europe Revised.” And then the Great War, and Cobb’s account of it in “Paths of Glory.” I have listed his books at such length--because they are at such length. Here is Cobb, aged only thirty-nine, a mere child in the game. A few years ago everybody was surprisedly saying that he was a good fellow, fished discriminatingly, told edifying tales, was a friend of Bob Davis and George Horace Lorimer and Sam Blythe, was not very handsome, but was one of the few big newspapermen in whose records there wasn’t one single black spot, one single case of meanness or pettiness or failure in sympathy. The diagnosis was usually wound up, “He will be a big writer.” That is, to-day, no proper ending for this scholarly biography of Cobb, for he _is_ a big writer, and his permanent place depends upon his written word. [Illustration] * * * * * [Illustration: WHEN A FELLER NEEDS A FRIEND BY BRIGGS] * * * * * KUDOS “Not to exceed one hundred words.”--_The Editors_ I A hundred words to eulogize And crown with figurative flowers Our honoured one?-- And chant his praises to the skies During these merry midnight hours? It can’t be done! II Search dictionaries for his fête! Rummage Thesaurus through and through And also rob Encyclopedias to date! Their million words are all too few To honour Cobb. III No! All the languages of Earth Set to the music of the spheres Can’t do the job! Not words but hearts enshrine your worth, Master of laughter and of tears, Old Irvin Cobb!