He clung tenaciously to a few haunts, one of these being for many years the office of the _Journal_, to which he contributed the poems in dialect that won his first recognition. The back room of the business office was a favorite loafing place for a number of prominent citizens who were responsive to Riley’s humor. They maintained there something akin to a country-store forum of which Riley was the bright particular star. A notable figure of those days in our capital was Myron Reed, a Presbyterian minister of singular gifts, who had been a captain of cavalry in the Civil War. Reed and William P. Fishback, a lawyer of distinction, also of the company, were among the first Americans to “discover” Matthew Arnold. Riley’s only excursion abroad was in company with Reed and Fishback, and surely no more remarkable trio ever crossed the Atlantic. It is eloquent of the breadth of Riley’s sympathies that he appreciated and enjoyed the society of men whose interests and activities were so wholly different from his own. They made the usual pious pilgrimages, but the one incident that pleased Riley most was a supper in the Beefsteak Room adjoining Irving’s theatre, at which Coquelin also was a guest. The theatre always had a fascination for Riley, and this occasion and the reception accorded his reading of some of his poems marked one of the high levels of his career. Mr. Fishback reported that Coquelin remarked to Irving of Riley’s recitations, that the American had by nature what they had been twenty years acquiring. In keeping with the diffidence already referred to was his dread of making awkward or unfortunate remarks, and it was like him to exaggerate greatly his sins of this character. He illustrated Irving’s fine nobility by an incident offered also as an instance of his own habit of blundering. Riley had known for years an English comedian attached to a stock company at Indianapolis, and he mentioned this actor to Irving and described a bit of “business” he employed in the part of First Clown in the graveyard scene in “Hamlet.” Irving not only professed to remember the man, but confirmed in generous terms Riley’s estimate of his performance as the grave-digger. When Riley learned later that what he had believed to be the unique practice of his friend had been the unbroken usage of the stage from the time of Shakespeare, he was inconsolable, and his blunder was a sore point with him to the end of his days.