Also, I once saw the women playing poker in this same home—and they were using “shinplaster” too—but they were not generous enough to invite me to go down under. I do not wish to name them. Nor would I have mentioned the boys’ names but for the fact all of them have now gone to their reward. And, besides, despite the undercurrent that it was not considered strictly genteel, everybody, more or less, played poker then—even, it was said, Father Bagley, our first High Priest, would take a hand occasionally. There was a regular fellow. For him it was Mass of a Sunday morning, then base ball or horse-racing in the afternoon, without fail. With this slow and awkward beginning it was a long, long time before I got nerve enough to sit in a private poker game as guest of a friend, in Kansas City, with a player who afterwards became President of the United States. He did not impress me as likely timber then. But, may I say, that when once in the running, he showed ‘em that he was truly from Missouri—and that, surprisingly, he could, in a pinch, run like a scared rabbit. Politics was his forte. In explanation of the Girl-Papa-Richboy incident: I had sent a boy with a note asking the girl for her company for a dance, a private dance to be given by our select crowd, of which she was a favorite. The boy came back without a written reply—but he said she told him to tell me that she would go with me. This being rather unusual, I asked the -boy if that was all she said? “Well,” he said, “her mother said, ‘Now, girlie, you know what your father will say’ — and the girl said, ‘I don’t care, I’m going with him anyway’.” I had not known about the rich man’s son trying to edge in, and this indicated slap by her papa was a grievous blow to my ego. I sent the girl another note, telling her in simple words—I always made ‘em simple now since having once, to no avail, slopped over ridiculously — that I had wormed out of the boy the remarks between mother and daughter, and that in consequence thereof I deemed it wise for me to cancel the date, until I could find out what it was all about. I may say I never sent but one formally phrased note to a girl in all my life—and that got me exactly nothing. That literary boy, Ecky Hamel, dictated it for me, and to make matters worse, it was to his girl. And he really wanted it to click—to ward off, in his absence, some dangerous competition.