I got the best of him only once. I prepared myself. I wrote out a passage from Shakespeare—it may have been the very one I quoted awhile ago, I don’t remember—and riddled it with his wild steamboatful interlardings. When an unrisky opportunity offered, one lovely summer day, when we had sounded and buoyed a tangled patch of crossings known as Hell’s Half Acre, and were aboard again and he had sneaked the _Pennsylvania_ triumphantly through it without once scraping sand, and the _A. T. Lacey_ had followed in our wake and got stuck, and he was feeling good, I showed it to him. It amused him. I asked him to fire it off—_read_ it; read it, I diplomatically added, as only _he_ could read dramatic poetry. The compliment touched him where he lived. He did read it; read it with surpassing fire and spirit; read it as it will never be read again; for _he_ knew how to put the right music into those thunderous interlardings and make them seem a part of the text, make them sound as if they were bursting from Shakespeare’s own soul, each one of them a golden inspiration and not to be left out without damage to the massed and magnificent whole. I waited a week, to let the incident fade; waited longer; waited until he brought up for reasonings and vituperation my pet position, my pet argument, the one which I was fondest of, the one which I prized far above all others in my ammunition-wagon—to wit, that Shakespeare couldn’t have written Shakespeare’s works, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk, and lawyer-ways—and if Shakespeare was possessed of the infinitely divided star-dust that constituted this vast wealth, _how_ did he get it, and _where_ and _when_? “From books.”