VACHEL told me once, to save his self-respect, he took a job in Chicago in a department store at seven dollars a week, and was employed in the wholesale toy department; a whole block of toys, where was to be found every imaginable plaything for young and old, from dolls as large as three-year-old children to family portrait albums that, having a musical box in their binding, played “The Old Folks at Home” and various hymn-tunes when you opened them. He told how a lad called Timmins wound up all the albums he could lay his hands on, and laid them open and went away to another part of the building, and of the wild din that ensued. Timmins was “fired.” He told how he lived amid acres of dolls and how, to satisfy the fire insurance inspectors, a three-foot clearance was made between the top of the toy heaps and the roof, and how all one night they did overtime slamming down rows and sections of dolls and toys on to waiting trucks, and they were rushed to another place. Then the inspectors came and passed the building. And when they were gone the Ghetto came and bought the “bum dolls” from the “smash dump,” and Vachel and the rest were soon building toys up to the roof once more. * * * * * “BUT none of my friends liked my earning my living in this way. They’d prefer to see me in a bank or an insurance office. You see, I could not paint a picture that would keep me. I would not enter commercial art--I mean advertisement drawing. My poems did not sell, and people thought I had spent long enough studying and loafing, and that I ought to begin to earn a decent living. So I went into the Chicago Department Store. They did not like that. So I took to the road again. Curiously enough, Francis Hackett took a job in that same store before his star arose.” Vachel and I had a great pow-wow by night and morning fire, and I cannot set down half here in these (I hope) dignified paragraphs. But all the while we sat and talked, the prairie rats sat about us on their tails and haunches, and stared curiously with their forepaws on their chests like good masons in their rituals. They smelt the beans, they smelt the cheese, they smelt the corn-beef hash; they knew they were protected by the United States Government and they had never seen a dog or a cat. Curiously friendly little companions! After the cloudy night there was a serene morning. When the veils were lifted off the mountains we knew them for just what they were. They did not go all the way to the sky after all.