I pray not that Men tremble at My power of place And lordly sway,— I only pray for simple grace To look my neighbor in the face Full honestly from day to day— Yield me his horny palm to hold, And I’ll not pray For gold:— The tanned face, garlanded with mirth, It hath the kingliest smile on earth— The swart brow, diamonded with sweat, Hath never need of coronet. And so I reach Dear Lord to Thee, And do beseech Thou givest me The wee cot, and the cricket’s chirr, Love, and the glad sweet face of her! THROWN ON HIS OWN RESOURCES. The boy’s father, like almost all fathers, had aspirations. He wanted the boy to follow in his footsteps, in the legal profession, and he held out alluring hopes of the possibility of scaling even greater heights than any to which he had yet attained. Better still,—from the standpoint of the restless James,—he took the youngster with him as he made his circuit from court to court. These excursions, for they were indeed such to the boy, sowed deep in his heart the seed of a determination to become a nomad, and it was not long until he started out as a strolling sign-painter, determined upon the realization of his ideals. Oftentimes business was worse than dull, and, on one occasion, hunger drove him for recourse to his wits, and lo, he blossomed forth as a “blind sign-painter,” led from place to place by a little boy, and showered with sympathy and trade in such abundance that he could hardly bear the thought of the relinquishment of a pretense so ingenious and successful, entered on at first as a joke. Then came another epoch. The young man fell in with a patent-medicine man, with whom he joined fortunes, and here the young Indianian, who had been scribbling more or less poetry ever since he first essayed to compose a four-line valentine upon a writing table whose writing surface was almost as high as his head, found a new use for his talent, for his duties in the partnership were to beguile the people with joke and song, while his co-worker plied the sales of his cure-all; and, forsooth, there were many times when, but for his poetic fancy, Riley might have seen his audience dwindle rapidly away. It was while thus engaged that he had the opportunities which enabled him to master thoroughly the “Hoosier” dialect. When the glamour of the patent-medicine career had faded somewhat, Riley joined a band of strolling Thespians, and, in this brief portion of his life, after the wont of players of his class, played many parts. At length he began to give a little more attention to his literary work, and, later, obtained a place on an Indianapolis paper, where he published his first poems, and be it said that they won their author almost instant success. [Illustration: COURTSHIP] WHY HE LONGED TO BE A BAKER.