How a poet could _not_ be a glorious eater, it was one of Kilmer’s whims to say, he could not see; for the poet was happier than other men by reason of his acuter senses, and as his eyes delighted in the beauty of the world, so should his palate thrill with pleasure in the taste of the earth’s bounteous yield for the sustenance of men. The romance, too, of the things we eat he felt lustily. Rich spices from the Orient, And fruit that knew Italian skies. He had another, and a decidedly quaint, notion of food. He firmly believed that hearty eating was an adequate physical compensation for loss of sleep. He was fond of declaring his faith in this fantastic idea by means of a story of some “ancient receptive child” (friend of his) who managed to bring up a family of seven (or so) children by ill-paid hack-work occupying most of the day and night--a noble success due entirely to noble meals. * * * * * This man has home and child and wife And battle set for every day. This man has God and love and life; These stand, all else shall pass away. And “this man’s” days were long, long days: Kilmer’s home, a place of boundless week-end hospitality and almost equally boundless domesticity (guests being obliged to exercise much agility in clambering about toys with which the stairs were laden), was also year after year a place of almost unbelievable literary industry. The trying idiosyncrasies of the artistic temperament were about as discernible in Kilmer as kleptomania. He was, as you may say, social and domestic in his habits of writing to an amazing degree. Night after night he would radiantly walk up and down the floor singing a lullaby to one of his children whom he carried screaming in his arms while he dictated between vociferous sounds to his secretary or wife--his wife frequently driven by the drowsiness of two in the morning to take short naps with her head upon the typewriter while the literally tireless journalist filled and lighted his pipe. This, however, was an atmosphere of cloistral seclusion compared with Kilmer’s office at the _New York Times_. Here, where he regularly got through each week enough hard work to hold down three or four fairly capable young men, he maintained a sort of salon for a ludicrous variety of picturesque characters with nothing in particular to do and no place else to go, ranging from types of patrician leisure to stray dogs of the literary world visibly out of a job.