"You're making good, and I'm glad of it ... because they're looking on you as my protege ... holding me responsible for you. Munday, in the Schiller class, tells me you sometimes bring in your daily lesson in _Wilhelm Tell_, translated into blank verse ... and good stuff, too.... And King says he turns over the most difficult lines in Horace in class for you to translate and construe." Langworth had only half the truth from King. Whenever the latter came upon a passage a little off colour, he put me on it, chuckling to himself ... he knew I would go right through with it without hesitation. * * * * * About this time I received a letter from William Hayes Ward, editor of the New York _Independent_. He informed me that he had taken a poem of mine. And, as indubitable proof, he enclosed a check for five dollars. Professor Langworth was himself a poet of no mean ability: he was pleased to hear that I had sold a poem to the _Independent_. * * * * * I was sick of being shunned because I carried stable smells about with me wherever I went. Also, sanguinely, with the sale of my first poem, I was sure that my literary career had begun, and that from now on I would be enabled to earn my living by my pen, and pay my way as a student, too. So I threw up the job that made me smell so unpleasantly. * * * * * The city of Laurel had been, in the early days, in the memory of settlers yet living a hale life, a pioneer outpost. Through it flowed a great, muddy river. The flat roofs of its main street still preserved a frontier appearance. It was surrounded by high, wind-swept bluffs. They still talked of the Quantrell raid and repeated the story of it ... and of how the six men were lynched under the bridge that swung over the dam.... At the time of the slavery agitation its citizens had encouraged the negroes to escape, had petted them, idealised them as no human beings of any race should be idealised ... had run schools specially for them where it was considered an honour for the women of the settlers to teach. Now, the great negro population, at first so encouraged, was crowded into a festering multitude of dilapidated buildings that stood on the flats close by the region where the river coiled through level acres of low-lying country. This place was known as the "Bottoms." I am trying to give you the flavour of the town. They had prohibition there, too ... long before it won nation-wide power ... consequently the negroes drove a vast trade in bootlegging ... and a concomitant prostitution of coloured women and girls throve. One or two students on the hill had, to my knowledge, negro mistresses of whom they were fond.... The drug stores did a thriving business in the sale of spiritus frumenti--for "snake bite" and "stomach trouble," which seemed to be prevalent and epidemic throughout the community. * * * * *