Story after story was also written about our curious little colony. Penton Baxter shared honours with the shoemaker. Reporters swarmed over his front porch and into his house to interview him, on the triumphant return of the party when they had served their forty-eight hours. Penton gave out interview after interview. And, to his credit let it be said, though he revelled in the notice accorded him, he also effected two serious results from what had begun as almost a practical joke ... he started a fight on the absurd Blue Laws by focusing publicity on them ... and he exposed the bad prison conditions his unknown fellow prisoners lived under, who had _not_ gone to the workhouse in a jocular mood because of resurrected Blue Laws. Jones was willing to let the matter rest, as well as were his other opponents ... but Baxter kept the fight going as long as he could. He was accused of loving notoriety. His attitude toward it was mixed. He did love notoriety ... he enjoyed every clipping about himself with infinite gusto. But he also used publicity as a lever to get things done with, that would otherwise never have been noticed. The others were willing to consider what had happened to them, as a private affair. Penton gracelessly used that, and every private adventure for propaganda--turned it sincerely in the way he thought it might benefit people.... He gave the papers a very bad poem--_The Prison Night_. I remember but one line of it-- "The convict rasped his vermin-haunted hide." * * * * * "Come, get into the group; I want the papers to tell the public about you, too," he urged me, prophetically, as I stood on the outskirts, while three camera men were focusing on him, as he stood, expectant, blandly smiling, and vain-glorious. "Boys, I want my friend, the poet, Mr. John Gregory, in the picture, too." "Oh, all right!" they assented indifferently, which injured my egotism. But I was too adroit to show it. I still demurred with mock modesty. Penton would have been franker. Finally, at his urgency, they snapped us, our arms about each other's shoulders. In the light of subsequent events, they were glad of that picture. * * * * * Our tennis-playing, Blue-Law martyrs, as I have said, were held over night in the workhouse ... or maybe two nights, I do not exactly remember which ... and when they came back they were full of the privations of jail-life, and the degradation of the spirit and mind suffered by prisoners there. To me, their attitude seemed rather tender-foot and callow. It was something that would have been accepted off-handedly by me. I had been in jail often, not for a cause, as I punned wretchedly, but _be-cause_. I did not accord hero-worship to Penton when he returned, as the women of the household did. For a week it quite reconciled Hildreth with him.... * * * * *