His first reception into the inner literary circle was in 1887, when he participated in the authors’ readings given in New York to further the propaganda of the Copyright League. Lowell presided on these occasions, and others who contributed to the exercises were Mark Twain, George W. Cable, Richard Henry Stoddard, Thomas Nelson Page, Henry C. Bunner, George William Curtis, Charles Dudley Warner, and Frank R. Stockton. It was, I believe, Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson, then of the _Century Magazine_ (which had just enlisted Riley as a contributor), who was responsible for this recognition of the Hoosier. Nothing did more to establish Riley as a serious contestant for literary honors than his success on this occasion. He was greeted so cordially--from contemporaneous accounts he “ran away with the show”--that on Lowell’s urgent invitation he appeared at a second reading. Riley’s intimate friendships with other writers were comparatively few, due largely to his home-keeping habit, but there were some for whom, without ever seeing much of them, he had a liking that approached affection. Mark Twain was one of these; Mr. Howells and Joel Chandler Harris were others. He saw Longfellow on the occasion of his first visit to Boston. Riley had sent him several of his poems, which Longfellow had acknowledged in an encouraging letter; but it was not the way of Riley to knock at any strange door, and General “Dan” Macaulay, once mayor of Indianapolis, a confident believer in the young Hoosier’s future, took charge of the pilgrimage. Longfellow had been ill, but he appeared unexpectedly just as a servant was turning the visitors away. He was wholly kind and gracious, and “shook hands five times,” Riley said, when they parted. The slightest details of that call--it was shortly before Longfellow’s death--were ineffaceably written in Riley’s memory--even the lavender trousers which, he insisted, Longfellow wore! Save for the years of lyceum work and the last three winters of his life spent happily in Florida, Riley’s absences from home were remarkably infrequent. He derived no pleasure from the hurried travelling made necessary by his long tours as a reader; he was without the knack of amusing himself in strange places, and the social exactions of such journeys he found very irksome. Even in his active years, before paralysis crippled him, his range of activities was most circumscribed. The Lockerbie Street in which he lived so comfortably, tucked away though it is from the noisier currents of traffic, lies, nevertheless, within sound of the court-house bell, and he followed for years a strict routine which he varied rarely and only with the greatest apprehension as to the possible consequences.