In nothing was he more diverting than in the superstitions he affected. No life could have been freer from annoyances and care than his, and yet he encouraged the belief that he was pursued by a “hoodoo.” This was the most harmless of delusions, and his nearest friends encouraged the idea for the enjoyment they found in his intense satisfaction whenever any untoward event--never anything important--actually befell him. The bizarre, the fantastic, had a mild fascination for him; he read occult meanings into unusual incidents of every kind. When Alfred Tennyson Dickens visited Indianapolis I went with him to call on Riley. A few days later Mr. Dickens died suddenly in New York, and soon afterward I received a note that he had written me in the last hour of his life. Riley was so deeply impressed by this that he was unable to free his mind of it for several days. It was an astounding thing, he said, to receive a letter from a dead man. For a time he found comfort in the idea that I shared the malevolent manifestations to which he fancied himself subject. We were talking in the street one day when a brick fell from a building and struck the sidewalk at our feet. He was drawing on a glove and quite characteristically did not start or manifest any anxiety as to his safety. He lifted his head guardedly and with a casual air said: “I see they’re still after you” (referring to the fact that a few weeks earlier a sign had fallen on me in Denver). Then, holding out his hands, he added mournfully: “They’re after me, too!” The gloves--a pair brought him from London by a friend--were both lefts. A number of years ago he gave me his own copy of the _Oxford Book of English Verse_--an anthology of which he was very fond. In it was pasted a book-plate that had previously escaped me. It depicted an old scholar in knee-breeches and three-cornered hat, with an armful of books. When asked about the plate, Riley explained that a friend had given it to him, but that he had never used it because, on counting the books, there seemed to be thirteen of them. However, some one having convinced him that the number was really twelve, the evil omen was happily dispelled. Politics interested him not at all, except as to the personal characteristics of men prominent in that field. He voted only once, so he often told me, and that was at the behest of a friend who was a candidate for some local office. Finding later that in his ignorance of the proper manner of preparing a ballot he had voted for his friend’s opponent, he registered a vow, to which he held strictly, never to vote again. My own occasional dabblings in politics caused him real distress, and once, when I had playfully poked into a hornet’s nest, he sought me out immediately to warn me of the dire consequences of such temerity. “They’ll burn your barn,” he declared; “they’ll kidnap your children!”