"I wrote _Waiting_," he said, "in 1862, when I was reading medicine in the office of a country physician. It was a dingy afternoon, and I was feeling pretty blue. But the thought came to me--I suppose I got it from Goethe or some of the Orientals, probably by way of Emerson--that what belonged to me would come to me in time, if I waited--and if I also hustled. So I waited and I hustled, and my little poem turned out to be a prophecy. My own has come to me, as I never expected it to come. The best friends I have were seeking me all the while. There's Henry Ford; he had read all my books, and he came to me--that great-hearted man, the friend of all the birds, and my friend. "The poem first appeared in the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. That magazine was edited by a Cockney named Kinneha Cornwallis. It ran long enough to print one of Cornwallis's novels, and then it died. I remember that the _Knickerbocker Magazine_ never paid me for _Waiting_, and the poem didn't attract any attention until Whittier printed it in his _Songs of Three Centuries_. "It has been changed and tampered with and had all sorts of things done to it. It was found among the manuscripts of a poet down South after his death, and his literary executor was going to print it in his book. He wrote to me and asked if I could show a date for it earlier than 1882. I said, 'Yes, 1862!' and that settled that matter. "There was a man in Boston that I wanted to kick! He wrote to me and asked if he could print _Waiting_ on a card and circulate it among his friends. I told him he could, and sent him an autographed copy to make sure he'd get it straight. He sent me a package of the printed cards, and I found that he had added a stanza to it--a religious stanza, all about Heaven's gate! He had left out the second stanza, and added this religious stanza. He was worried because God had been left out of my poem--poor God, ignored by a little atom like me! "When people ask me where I got the idea in it, I generally say that my parents were old-school Baptists and believed in foreordination, and that's the way that foreordination cropped out in me--it's a sort of transcendental version of foreordination. I think the poem is true--like attracts like; it's the way in which we are constituted, rather than any conscious factor, that insures success. It's that that makes our fortunes, it's that that is the 'tide in the affairs of men' that Shakespeare meant."