Some men will live as prudes in their own village And make the tour abroad for their wild tillage— I knew a tourist agent, one whose art is To run such tours. He calls ’em .... house parties. But Radway was a patriot whose venality Was purer in its love of one locality, A home-industrious worker to perfection, A senatorial jobber for protection, Especially on books, lest knowledge break in Upon the national brains and set ’em achin’. (’Tis an anomaly in our large land of freedom, You can not get cheap books, even if you need ’em). Radway was ignorant as an editor, And, heavenly, holy gods! I can’t say more, Though I know one, a very base detractor, Who has the phrase “As ignorant as an actor”. But turn to Radway: the first night on the river, Running so close to “hell” it sends a shiver Down Rodyheaver’s prophylactic spine, Let me return to this bold theme of mine, Of Radway. O clap hand ye moralists! And meditate upon the Lord’s conquests. When last I met him, he was a pillar in An organization for the suppression of sin .... Not that he’d changed his tastes, nor yet his habits, (Such changes don’t occur in men, or rabbits). Not that he was a saint, nor was top-loftical In spiritual aspirations, but he found it profitable, For as Ben Franklin said, with such urbanity: “Nothing will pay thee, friend, like Christianity”. And in our day thus saith the Evangelist: “Tent preachin’ is the kind that pays the best.” ’Twas as a business asset _pure an’ simple_ That Radway joined the Baptist Broadway Temple. I find no moral for a peroration, He is the prototype of half the nation. ---------- [3] [_Note_: It is through no fault of my own that this diversion was not given to the reader two years ago; but the commercial said it would not add to their transcendent popularity, and the vers-libre fanatics pointed out that I had used a form of terminal consonance no longer permitted, and my admirers (_j’en ai_), ever nobly desirous of erecting me into a sort of national institution, declared the work “unworthy” of my mordant and serious genius. So a couple of the old gentlemen are dead in the interim, and, alas, two of the great men mentioned in passing, and the reader will have to accept the opusculus for what it is, some rhymes written in 1915. I would give them now with dedication “To the Anonymous Compatriot Who Produced the Poem ‘Fanny’, Somewhere About 1820”, if this form of centennial homage be permitted me. It was no small thing to have written, in America, at that distant date, a poem of over forty pages which one can still read without labour. _E. P._] [4] Pronounce like respectable Russians: “_Mussqu_”. Eeldrop and Appleplex T. H. Eliot II