We stood on the top of Azure Mound. Baxter was puffing heavily, for it had been a hard climb. At our feet extended a panorama of what seemed like a whole State. The wide-spread fields of wheat, of corn, exalted us. "God, what a glorious country!... no wonder Walt loved America ... in spite of the abuses capital has perpetrated in it." "Walt Mason?" I enquired, mischievously.... "No," he responded, seriously, "Walt Whitman." "But our poet laureate to-day is Walt Mason ... and our State philosopher, the sage of Potato Hill, Ed Howe, is an honest-to-God stand-patter ... that's Kansas to-day for you, in spite of her wide, scenic vistas.... "Nevertheless," I went on, "Kansas does develop marvellous people ... we have Carrie Nation--" "And Johnnie Gregory!" put in Baxter. "I don't want just to belong to Kansas." It was I who was humourless now, "I'm sick of its corn-fed bourgeois ideals ... I want to belong to the world--as--you do!" We trudged back to town. "What a site for a university!... the men who put those buildings up there on the Hill must have dreamed greatly ... look at the sun!... the buildings are transfigured into a fairy city!" * * * * * My office as social manager for Baxter during his stay I conducted badly. I was so excited and flattered by the visit of one whom I considered one of the first geniuses of the world, that I hardly knew what I was doing. I listened to all he said as if an oracle spoke. I asked him if he would like to meet some of the professors on the Hill.... I hurriedly gathered together a small group of them and Baxter gave a talk to them in one of the unoccupied recitation rooms. Nor did he fail in telling them that in me Kansas had a great poet in the making ... the professors who were not invited to my hasty reception considered themselves slighted. When I saw Baxter off at the station we were calling each other by our first names. "Good-bye, Johnnie!" "Good-bye, Penton!" "Don't fail to visit me at Warriors' River, this fall, if you can do so conveniently." I assured him that I would not fail. For I had spoken with him of my determination to ship on the Great Lakes for a few months, to see if I couldn't garner some poetic material for my poems of modern life that I was writing for the _National Magazine_. "My wife and I will be at Warriors' River till late in the fall. We're staying at Stephen Barton's Health Home. Barton is a good friend of mine.... I am helping him out, since he left New Jersey, where he was forced, by a series of petty prosecutions, to give up Perfection City.... My wife will be glad to see you ... she knows your poetry already." * * * * * The weather was warm again. My next to my last college year was drawing to a close. Not that I was a graduate ... my course was a special one, and I had not followed even that closely.