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JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY.COM PRESENTS

By Clara Laughlin

PART 2

V

     HE kept an eager lookout in those days for the fresh, new voices in prose and poetry. It was he who sent me the first thing of W. 13. Yeats' that I ever saw: a thin little copy of "The Land of Heart's Desire," bound in gray boards; and on the fly-leaf Mr. Riley wrote these lines, which are so lovely that they cannot be called a parody; he called them, in the caption,

" Yatesesque"

The wind blows over the bills of dawn,
The wind blows over the heavy of heart—And the heavy heart aches on and on,
While the dancing fairies wheel and part, Twirling their star-white feet in a round
Waving their moon-white arms in the air, Till the low wind leaps, with a laughing sound,
And sings of a land where the old are fair—Where the old are fair, and the sad are gay,
And life lives on, and death is gone­
There love and loveliness wear alway,
And never a heart aches on and on."

The lines which suggested these I give also, that those who care to may compare them with Riley's. They are the lines sung outside Maurteen Bruin's house by the faery child before she enters and after she leaves.

" The wind blows out of the gates of the day,

The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away, While the faeries dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring, Tossing their milk-white arms in the air;
For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair,
And even the wise are merry of tongue;
But I heard a reed of Coolaney say,

' When the wind has laughed and mur­mured and sung,

The lonely of heart must wither away.' "

Another author who should have done her best to have me shot at sunrise or hanged at high noon "of a Friday " was Alice French (Octave Thanet), from whom I un­blushingly beguiled every now and then a three hundred or five hun­dred dollar story for about four dollars and ninety-eight cents. But a bigger heart than hers never beat; and instead of treating me as I deserved, she did me a multitude of charming kindnesses, personal as well as " professional." For instance, having found much to thrill her in W. E. Henley's poems, she bought at Scribners', in New York, a copy for me, and wrote me that it was on the way. 'When it was some time overdue, I told her. She ordered a second copy—and they both came in one mail. " Send the duplicate to anyone who may care for it," she directed me. I sent it to Mr. Riley, who wrote of it:

" I don't like the man—the man so greatly endowed of God as he, and yet deliberately and elaborately crying out against Him and His dispensations irks an optimistic kuss like me immeasurably: All I most marvel at is therefore dubious,—sometimes it seems the man's transcendent genius, and then it seems God's patience

But, anyway, I s'pose,

' He knows—He knows—HE knows! ' "

Later, in talking to me about Henley, he expressed enormous con­trition for that letter. " I didn't know, when I wrote it, what he has had to fight against," he said, humbly. " Good Lord! dying by inches in that hideous way! And having to see that child die! I'm sorry I ever said anything. Per haps if I were in his place I'd cry, too, about the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole!' "

Henley's savage attack on Ste­venson was hard for Mr. Riley to forgive; but I know he tried to feel the situation from Henley's side.

" Both of them physically frail, handicapped by almost continual suffering," he said; " and yet one is worshipped by all the world as its apostle of sweet courage, and the other wins respect from a few as the apostle of grim endurance. I think I can understand how Henley feels. But it's too bad! Too bad! "

Riley's enthusiasm for Stevenson was beautiful. I can remember his asking me with great wistfulness if I thought Stevenson had ever seen anything he (Riley) had written. And I know that once, passing a theatre in Indianapolis, he was at­tracted by the announcement that E. J. Henley was playing there. Reflecting that this man must have had some acquaintance with Steven­son, Mr. Riley sought the stage-door and sent in his card. His mood was that which Browning so simply and exquisitely conveyed in " Memorabilia":

" And did you once see Shelley, plain?
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!"

The actor received Mr. Riley graciously, but his grace evanished quickly when he learned why his visitor had come.

"Stevenson? " he said, as if he recalled only with an effort his brother's long-time friend. " Stevenson? Ah, yes—yes! A queer person! Liked to wear a velvet coat—and all that sort o' thing, don't ye know."

That was all. But Mr. Riley could never forget it.

Once he said to me: " Did you ever know that until after he was grown and mustached Stevenson was a blonde? That his hair didn't darken until he was past his ma­jority? "

I had not known it; but it transpired that he had found a portrait of Stevenson which was taken when he was almost as fair as Riley's flaxen self.

" I wrote some maundering verses to it," —he told me in a letter, afterwards, "nay to the lovely man himself—sent picture and lines to magazine and publishing house, and they wrote to say portrait and verses would appear in their Christmas magazine, and enclosed a great corpulent check which I had not dreamed of in such connection—so returned it, coyly saying even if I had intended the lines for money, their check was in vast excess of their worth—but if, in lieu of such sordid com­pensation, Robert Louis Stevenson's pub.. Ushers were to send me a set of his books, it would seem to me about all the recom­pense I could bear.

"Well, now here's where only a poet can humor and account for the doings of Divinity:—As I stepped out into the golden morning-edge of my very recentest birth­day, Robert Louis Stevenson was blithely seeing to it that his books were being then and there delivered into my hands by the expressman who looked and acted just for the world as though he were deliver­ing the package to me—even made me sign something to that effect, I think!"

The temptation to go on and on quoting what he said and wrote about other authors is very great. But I will withstand it, save for a very few concessions.

I recall his ardent championship of Longfellow, and his bitterness against those who spoke contemptuously of Longfellow's flowing rhyme and rhythm, as if his thought must be less noble because it could be _:understood without a " key "; and as if his poetry must have been effortless because it could be mem­orized so easily.

" Nobody knows any better than I do," Mr. Riley said to me, " how hard it is to write such measures as ' The Psalm of Life.' "

lie could not understand why Browning, if he believed in the worth of his message to the world, was not more concerned than he seemed to be that so small part of the world could comprehend it.

Of all his literary loves, though, none was so strong as that he had for Burns:

" Sweet singer that I lo'e the moist 0' ony, sin' wi' eager haste

I smacket bairn-lips ower the taste 0' hinnied Sang."

Burns in verse, and Dickens in prose. " Am just reading," he wrote in April, '99, " the primest, finest, most mellerest, ripest and juiciest of all novels ever writ! Wonder if you've run acrost it yet? It is called ' David Copperfield.' Ah, mountain pine and stately Kentish spire! Ye have one tale to tell! '"

His feeling for Poe is so well known that I offer no comment on it here, save such as may throw for some persons a new light on that affinity: James Whitcomb Riley came into the world on the day that Edgar Allan Poe went out of it. To a mind so sensitive, so imagina­tive as Riley's, this could not be without more significance than a mere coincidence.

VI

_ir CANNOT recall with any ex- n actitude the " first beginnings " of the compilation called " Riley Love Lyrics"; that is, whether we thought first of the volume and then of the illustrator, or first of the illustrator and then of the volume.

Mr. William B. Dyer was one of the first—if not the very first in­deed !—in Chicago to open a studio for the " new " photography which was so wonderfully different from tin " old." He had made many studies of me, and of people I knew, and I was deeply interested in his art. It was probably my sugges­tion that his pictures would beau­tifully illustrate certain poems (he is a very modest gentleman, and I am sure he didn't suggest it), and it may well have been I who thought first of Riley poems.

We sent down to Mr. Riley a number of Mr. Dyer's pictures, with a plan for the proposed book.

" At once," he wrote, " I'll take the lovely pictures to the B—M's—this im­mediate now. All I can say is in the assur­ance of my consent to the artist's scheme should my publishers indorse same. So please inform the gifted man of my hale appreciation of his work, which I fervently trust may meet the like estimate of the publishers. Would advise you to write them, as an appeal from you to them would far outweigh the very heftiest one of mine."

It was, of course, not my " ap­peal " at all, but his enthusiasm for the project and Mr. Dyer's capability for it that enlisted the publishers. And in a short while work on the volume was begun. I believe I selected the poems—subject to Mr. Riley's approval and to Mr. Dyer's acceptance of them as illustratable with a camera. And for further contribution, I posed for some of the pictures and acted as consulting " authority " on the types to be used for others. That is not to say that I presumed to offer Mr. Dyer any artistic sug­gestions—only, to help him from time to time with guesses as to what I thought would best express the poet's idea. When I couldn't guess, I asked the poet. Witness:

" MY DEAR LADY GLENDOWER:

"As best I can here do I answer your order of questions—only wishing you had asked more, and more difficult ones. 1st. The fair girl whose father called her in and shut the door was twelve years of age, perhaps, and the dark, eerie child was younger by two years, about. (Mighty glad that poem is selected, as it has always been a favorite one, though why it is I don't know, any more than I don't know  whence it sprung or what the little change­ling mystical bit is all about.)

"2d. I think it may be either a man or a woman who prays' Let not this New Year be as happy as the old!' It's a mature, sensible lover, man or woman, with no golf-links background.

" 3d. His Vigil' is the same married man who utterly loves his wife in sonnet ' When She Comes Home.' No, he is not ill—but sick of himself, and wants to be simply tolerated, all in the dark and the silence, by his divine superior, her human hand holding his own.

" 4th. ' The Passing of a Heart' is a noble woman lied to by the husband who proves (very naturally) the opposite of all he promised ere they were one.—John Hay has a distitch som'er's which wisely bids the maiden:—' Marry whomsoever thou wilt, and thou wilt find thou hast married somebody else.'

" The old savant will be delighted to answer any question you can skeer up. Just as easy to him as it was to Merlin when the wily Vivian inquired Prithee, 0 sire adorable, why is 't the sweetest love must needs seem e'en the saddest?' and he promptly answered, with his twinkless eyes fixed full on space, ' Because God loves the Irish.'

" Wid a wurrld av bewilderin' wishes,
"Your always grateful

" Jamesy O'Reilly."

It was this " Jamesy " who wrote to me always in the gayest moods. " Dear F. A.," another of his letters begins, " which here means Fellow American:

" Till this blessed minute I've not had the chanst to thank yez for the lavish bunch of papers. [Copies of our weekly containing his poem Billy Miller's Circus Show,' for the publication of which he seemed as eager as if it were his first appear­ance in print.] Sure they were daisies­wid shamrocks mixed amongst 'um thick as the sthars be curdled in The Milky Way! An' thank an' praise ye likewise for the wrappers of the same--wid every con­vainince on 'um but the paste an' postage stamps! So like yer own foresighted thoughtfulness!

"As ever your grateful, fraternal and eternal " Jamesy O'Reilly."

In the margin of this letter is the following:

Kate Shane, the coquette iv all Dayton, Heart-struck wid a strange palpitaatin', Called Docther NIcGrothin,

Who said it were nawthin'

But soutethin' the gyurl had been aitin't "

VII

     THERE are many memories of him which I find it hard to group. And yet, because each one of them is characteristic and illu­minative, I cannot bear to leave them out.

I of ten asked him for verification or denial of certain stories about him. One that came to me was that he had been a guest of Mrs. Humphrey Ward's at a time when that distinguished lady was much interested in the mysteries of the planchette or ouija-board. The story ran that Mr. Riley, on being asked from whom he would like a message, promptly replied " Charles Lamb." (I should have said some­thing about his great fondness for Lamb.) Thereupon he put his hands

c9

on the little table, as directed, and it began to move about among the letters of the alphabet painted on the underlying board. To Mrs. Ward's mortification, it picked out a string of consonants from which no pos­sible word could be guessed. She apologized to Mr. Riley for the ouija's misbehavior. Re looked sur­prised. " Why," lie murmured, " that's all right. Lamb stuttered, you know."

To this Mr. Riley pleaded guilty.

Another story, a very touching one, had it that in his young man­hood Mr. Riley, desperately enam­ored of Ella Wheeler (now Mrs. Wilcox) and failing to win her, vowed himself to celibacy. He lis­tened attentively till I got to the end. Then: " That's very inter­esting," he declared, enthusiastically; " and it's all perfectly true—except that I never saw the lady! "

70

This was what the children call

a naughty story"; for he had seen the lady. But perhaps that was just his way of evading a question I had no right to ask.

Once I ventured to ask him why he didn't write more sonnets.

" Because," he answered, dryly, " the only people who read sonnets expect presentation copies."

He fumbled in his pockets one day when I was talking with him, and brought out a bit of paper.

" Here's something I've been plumbing on," he said. " Like to have it tried on you? "

It was " Old Glory "! And how he read it! I wanted to know what he was going to do with it. " Oh, nothing, yet," lie assured me. It was not polished to his satisfaction. I must have had the unbelievable temerity to ask him for it. Be­cause he wrote me:

71

" As to the ' Old Glory ' poem, I'm proud you want it, though I can't surrender it to the world at large just yet. In fact, it still remains unfinished, and when I shall be able to complete it to my satis­faction I've no idea under the heavens."

And later, replying to my letter when I had seen the poem and a beautiful article about the poet, in The Atlantic Monthly, he said:

" DEAR 3fY FAVORITE AUTHOR:

" Yes, it was lovely of The Atlantic and the peerless Carman to set me forth as they so generously have! And I've been trying to thank them, though I fear all too stammeringly to be clearly understood—as the measure of my appreciation and grati­tude was, and is, quite beyond just expres­sion. As to the poem, your praise of that demands like acknowledgment, though I spare you now—but must tell you that the girth of the check for it would seem to endorse your own exalted estimate of its worth. So that, as Mrs. Browning only could express it,

" • I stand too high for astonishment.' " God bless us, every one!"

" Say " I urged him, one evening when we were sitting out under the trees and something had brought to my mind his haunt­ingly lovely, richly musical lines in that poem.

" Don't know it," he answered.

" I do," I replied. " Go ahead—I'll prompt you."

" I'll bet you do! " he chuckled; and began.

He did know it. And as he proceeded, the dripping, honey-golden lusciousness of his own verse en­chanted him as it was enchanting me. The beauty, the warmth, the music of his voice was all too inde­scribable.

" 'And I held you in my bosom, as the husk may hold the fruit.'"

" God!" he said, fervently, " that is a beautiful line! . . . You know how I mean that?"

73

I did.

" Many people wouldn't," he went on, plaintively.

" No. . . . Do you recall in Henry van Dyke's reminiscences of Tenny­son that once when reading aloud to Dr. van Dyke, Tennyson said something similar? The line at which he exclaimed was: The league-long rollers broke in thunder on the beach.' And as Tennyson boomed it forth in his great voice the effect was truly superb."

" Didn't van Dyke understand? " " Oh, yes! "

" My God! No poet is ever com­placent. How can anybody think it? The torment of the difference we feel between the thing visioned and the thing transcribed is more than enough to keep us in hell. And when you do find that you've got a glint of the real glory in some­thing you've done, do you get complacent? No! You feel as if the Lord had sent it to you, all faceted and flawless, and let you set it in with your own fumblings. Proud? No! You're just a'mighty grateful! "

His understanding of human nature was introspective and intuitive, I think—seldom, if ever, deductive and analytical. He did not readily establish points of easy contact with other people, and he was not happy with strangers. He seemed afraid to be himself with them, for fear they would not under­stand, and his sensitiveness was so great that he could scarcely have borne misunderstanding. I am sure he was right in his feeling about this; though often one wished he were not so loath to " be met." He hated " lionizing," not because he didn't like being a lion—for I am convinced he did—but because of the dismal inability of most per­sons to treat lions in any way which does not put them and keep them at a disadvantage. He knew he was not at his best when " lionized " —indeed, that he was quite at his worst. And no one can blame him for shying from the experience.

" I stand on one foot," he com­plained to me, whimsically, " and then on the other foot. And I don't know what to say."

His intimates understood this so well that they seldom or never tried to show him off.

But I recall one occasion when a few of his closest friends conspired against him in behalf of a very worthy candidate for the honor of Riley's acquaintance. This gentle­man was a physician in southern Illinois. He had just published a charming book of boy life in the country, rich in such human nature as Riley knew and loved best. He was the quietest, shyest person imaginable, but he had mustered cour­age to come to Indianapolis in the hope of seeing Mr. Riley, whom he had idolized from afar.

I was one of those who plotted to introduce this gentleman into a small circle of friends with whom Mr. Riley was so much at ease that be might forget the presence of one stranger. His publishers were party to the plot, and the episode was " staged " in the private of^fice of Mr. Hobbs.

The gentleman on pilgrimage was introduced; and then everyone worked mightily to start talk that might lure Mr. Riley from his silence. But he was like the Tar-Baby: "he kep' on sayin' nothin'."

I cannot remember how or why we talked of Hamlet. Perhaps some one was playing it in Indianapolis. But I know we were getting rather desperate.

" I'd like," someone said, "to see I hamlet played by a fair-haired Dane. I'm tired of brunette melancholy."

" Or by a fat man," another inter­posed. "Hamlet himself says he is fat and scant of breath."

And so on. It was all very forced and foolish; but the Tar-Baby had us almost hysterically self-conscious. Finally someone was emboldened to abandon strategy and lead a direct attack.

" How would you like to see ' Hamlet played, Mr. Riley? " he asked.

Mr. Riley appeared to consider.

" I'd like to see it played by a picked nine," he replied, gravely.

That was his total contribution. But there have been pilgrims to shrines of greatness who have fared worse.

VIII

     RIL E Y was the poet of childhood; but unless I grievously misread him, lie was not fond of children in the way that we are who love to have them around. He delighted in his memories of his own childhood and in fancies, whimsies, those memories inspired; but on the occasions when I knew him in the actual presence of flesh-and-blood youngsters, he was inclined to be easily disturbed by their behavior.

I think his vivid recollections of how he felt when he was a little boy made him critical of the attitude of most grown-ups toward small persons; and he may have been fearful of seeming to childish minds no better than the rest of the bunglesome adult world. He talked to me once of how it made him shrink and shrivel to see people pounce at a strange child and expect instant intimacy from it. He respected the child-mind far too much for that.

I have seen him sit in a room with a shy little girl and appear not to notice her; but to keep juggling or

palming " a half - dollar — in a " now - you - see - it - now - you -don't " way—until she was beside him, trying to see where it went to when it went away. Nor would he presume upon that show of in­tellectual interest, to put his arm around her or chuck her under the chin—let alone to tell her, in the uncouth jocosity of persons who are sure they "love children," that he was going to steal her.

Ile had a deep sense, I am sure, of the dignity and aloofness of young souls. Ile knew how tolerant they have to be of parents and other elders. Youth, far from thawing his shyness, seemed rather to increase it. If he was ever at his best when talking with children, those were times I had not the happiness to share. Yet children felt the witchery of his personality, and I have known them to sit spellbound by his talk with their elders.

One Sunday evening so early in my visits to Indianapolis that " Ed " was still a small boy, Elva Eitel and little Ed and I were returning to their home from having spent some enchanted hours at " Aunt Mamie's" with " Uncle Jim." I daresay Elva and I did not leave many pauses—we seldom did—but Ed was very quiet, even for him.

As we neared home he said:

" Do you know what I've been thinking? "

We didn't.

" I've been thinking that the most fascinating thing in the whole world is to hear Uncle Jim talk."

We agreed with him.

Yet, not once all evening had his Uncle Jim directed a fragment of conversation " at " Ed.

This may have been instinct with Mr. Riley, or it may have been memory, or it may have been canny, mature wisdom. But whatever it was, I often wish more people had it.

It was a strange relationship: lie valued them not for what they gave him of pleasure or understand­ing, but for all that " wonderland of wayward childhood " they helped him to recall; and they valued him because he seemed to take them for granted, as if they were grown-ups, making no insulting condescensions to them, but allowing them to form their own opinions of his worth.

The first of his books that he gave me has these lines of special inscrip­tion:

" 0 Wonderland of wayward Childhood! What

An easy, breezy realm of summer calm And dreamy gleam and gloom and bloom and balm

Thou art! The Lotus-Land the poet sung, It is the Child-World while the heart beats young."

And in the proem to that volume he sang:

"0 Child-World: After this world—just as when

I found you first sufficed

My soulmost need—if I found you again, With all my childish dreams so realized, I should not be surprised."

I wrote, once on a time, for The Book Buyer, a little article about Riley's poems of childhood, and when it was ready for the printers I sent it to him for correc­tions or suggestions.

" Of course," he wrote, " I approve the enclosed pages of praises of my boyhood muse—though you're a gentler one. Voice­less, therefore, in awe of reverence I bow. Nor think my attitude less worshipful when you find my pencil-marks, 0 so delicately trenching on your lines at times.

"On page 7, upper page, your comment reminds me, too, that you might find for it a fit quotation from a little poem in Armazindy ' vol., I think. I forget its exact title, but it's about a ' Dear child-hearted Woman that is dead '—and God hears her spirit whisper, just as He has made a stately angel of her, and in a twinkling she is a little child."

His ability, in story-telling, to personate a little boy was more than consummate histrionism; there was something psychic in it—as if the little boy he used to be came back at times, not only in the poet's mind, but in his looks and voice and movements. I have heard few things more wonderful than his narration of " Bud's Bear Story." It seemed to me as if I could see the workings of Bud's mind, as he conceived it point by point—that marvellous tale of the little boy in the woods, who, being chased by a bear, " dumb " a tree, the bear pursuing. " Bud's " excitement as his hero "haf to stay up in the tree—all night—" with the bear below going " Wooh ! woo—wooh!" was all evident in his face. Then—! never, until in that other Child-World I come up with him again, shall I see anything like the expres­sion on Bud's face, when he thought how to save his hero.

"The old Bear finds the Little Boy's gun, you know,
' At's on the ground.—(An' it ain't broke at all
I 'ist said that!) An' so the old Bear think '
He'll take the gun an' shoot the Little Boy:—"
     But shoots himself instead!

One often feels the authors of adventure stories caught in traps of their own contriving; but one seldom meets another so deliciously frank as " Bud."

Another masterpiece of what I can only call reincarnation was the boy who was not going to say his prayers " to-night, ner to-morrow night, ner the nex' night. An' after that, if nothin' happens, I ain't ever goin' to say 'em." But the nature of the thing he was pretty sure would happen filled him with a terror which his bravado could scarcely overcome.

How much lie lived in that land of long-ago, I suppose no one fully realized.

I remember telling him one day some boyish thing told me by his only nephew, " Ed "—Edmund H. Eitel, for some years his uncle's secretary, and now his literary ex­ecutor and his biographer. The poet was listening to me—but from far away. When I paused, he murmured, abstractedly:

" Who told you? Hum '? "

" Hum: was what he called his younger brother Humboldt, dead, then, for many years.

And_I can never forget the passionate intensity he expressed of longing for his mother.

"She has been dead," he once said to me, " for more than twenty years. Yet there are times when I want her so it seems to me I shall die."

His sisters told me a multitude of stories of his youth. But I shall not try to retell them. They be­long to the " Life " which Edmund Eitel is writing with such love and care and understanding. In these modestly offered pages I am keeping strictly to my own recollections. All over the country there are—there must be!—other persons with other recollections, and other rich hoards of his letters. To every one of us, it may be that he showed a different phase of himself; the im­pressions of one may even seem to contradict those of others. His was such infinite variety! And, of course, each of us saw him through a different kind of lens, according to our different personalities. It is my hope that never may I seem to say " Thus he was "—only, " Thus he appeared to me."

MR.^- RILEY'S readings of his own works were, as everybody knows, in very great demand throughout the country. It is sur­prising how much of that sort of thing he did; because he disliked travel and he heartily disliked being on a platform. He never overcame his stage fright, and used to suffer acutely from it—quaking nerves, stomach affected, and other rack­ing ills. " Getting ready for the road," he writes, " and gosh! how I dread it! "

" My Favorite Author," one letter be­gins, " I fear will not get as worthy a letter as deserved this time,—for, to save the soul o' me, I can find no gasp of time from the incessant havoc of travel and breathless stress of having to catch the nest train for some place else! And that letter of yours was such a good one, that a reply less masterful simply isn't fair to either of us, God knows. But what is there left a fellow between trains—poised on the crossties of one track, wildly trying to catch one train while he dodges another, and wishing he were in Chicago, where every­one walks—save, doubtless, the walling delegate? Both at Peoria and Galesburg your friends were most pleasantly mani­fest—so strikingly and helpfully so, that at both points of our combine I wanted them right along through the rest of the tour . . . ' And so we plough along,' as the fly said to the ox."

He once told me how he happened to bring into his repertory that narrative which Mark Twain called the supreme example of American humor, giving it as evidence in support of his contention that the charm of American humor lies not in the matter but in the manner. As for matter, that story is probably the hoariest " chestnut " in the whole category of time-honored jokes. But as Riley told it, it has become a classic. Briefly the story is that of a soldier whose leg was shot off. Ile entreated a com­rade to carry him back to the hos­pital-tent; the comrade complied and was carrying him pickaback, when another shell whizzed past carrying off the wounded man's head.

The comrade, unaware of what had happened, was halted by his Colonel. " Where are you going

with thal? ":the officer demanded.

" To the hospital; his leg's shot off."

" His leg f^a" the Colonel thundered; " his head's shot off!"

The soldier laid his burden down and looked at it reproachfully. " He told me it was his leg," he explained to the Colonel.

     The way Mr. Riley came to use this ancient story on the platform was this: He and Bill Nye were on a reading tour in the South. The weather was oppressively warm, their engagements were many, they had a great deal of travel and very little rest, and neither man was in robust health. All, however, would have been well enough had it not been for the reception committees. On the humorists' arrival in each town they were met by a delegation of influen­tial citizens chosen with reference to their local repute for humor. • Then, instead of going to the hotel where the weary " troopers " might rest, " low-necked hacks " were com­mandeered and the strangers were driven out to see " the high iron bridge," by which general descrip­tion Mr. Riley was wont to charac­terize the average small city's point of interest. All the way to the "bridge " and back the local humorists regaled their guests with stories of rare old vintages. And if the guests did not laugh fit to kill it was plain to see that they would be put down as having swelled heads. So they laughed, though it did indeed almost kill them, until one day Mr. Riley struck. He was hot, he was tired, he was a-wearied of high iron bridges, and go a-riding in that inevitable sea-going hack he would not. But Mr. Nye, unable to contemplate the local humorists' dismay, went with them. The afternoon wore on toward six o'clock before he returned.

Mr. Riley had written a lot of letters, rested himself, and was feel­ing so fine as to be full of mischief. At sight of Nye's tired, white face Riley was moved to wickedness. He tried to think which of all the hoary tales they heard in every town

Nye could least endure to hear again. The man with his head shot off stood out prominent in the record of their sufferings; so he began to tell it to Nye, faithfully mimicking the manner of those local humorists who had so strange a genius of telling a tale wrongside-before that whatever pith or point it might have had was undiscoverable. The way Riley told that story sent Nye intoparoxysms of laughter, and it was he who persuaded the astonished Riley to try this on the platform.

He never told it twice the same. At each telling he seemed to have some new inspiration. I heard it many, many times and came as near knowing it by heart as one could come to knowing a thing of such infinite variety. I remember one night in Indianapolis when Mr.: Riley was reading in English's Theatre. It was his first public appearance in his home town in a number of years, and he had given his services to raise money for a monument to General Harrison. Indianapolis was greatly excited over the event; people were in line before the ticket-window as early as two o'clock in the morning—seven hours before the sale of tickets was to be­gin. Mr. Riley suffered augmented agonies from stage-fright; his nerv­ousness caused him a great deal of trouble with his weak heart, and, among other ways of expressing itself, managed to bring on severe nose-bleeding. To know something of what he suffered was to suffer with him. I was in a box with his sisters, and we were all nervous. When Mr. Riley came to the story of the wounded soldier, of which by that time all his auditors had heard so much, we followed the familiar narrative point by point, anxious that he should get all the best points in. Alas, one of the funniest touches of all he left out entirely. We were so sorry. But, listen! What was he doing? The story was nearing its end, and the audience was con­vulsed with merriment. When every one had laughed until he cried, until his sides ached with shaking, until he felt that he could laugh no more, Mr. Riley went back to the beginning of the narrative and told it all over again, putting in the excruciatingly funny point he had missed before. And on the second telling his audience waxed hysterical.

I recall this incident because it is so illustrative of his kind of humor, which depended not at all on the surprisingness of what he had to say, but altogether on the inimitable way he had of saying it.

One never tired of the things he did. So far from feeling satisfied because you had once heard him recite " Good-by, Jim! Take keer yerself," one hearing of it only made you the more eager to hear it again and again. You might know the poem by heart; you might have heard him recite it fifty times; but it was always as fresh to you as the morning dew, and the more you had had of it the more you hungered for.

Mary Riley Payne, the younger of the poet's sisters, has a great deal of the:same sort of whimsical humor which her brother Jim had. And it was Mary who expressed, in comic paraphrase of a then current coon-song, an opinion which may be heretical on the Isle of Man, but is strict orthodoxy in many other places. Mr. Riley had given a read­ing in Tremont Temple, Boston, to an audience which jammed that  ample auditorium to its very ridge­pole. Not only the populace, but all the Olympians were there. Julia Ward Howe introduced him, and it was an occasion, even for Tremont Street. On the same evening, Mr. Hall Caine read in Boston to an audience, we were told, numbering less than a score.

"Oh, well!" Mary said. "What's wonderful in that? There's only one of Jim in all the world—and Hall Caines ' look alike to me! ' "

X

THERE was indeed only "one of Jim in all the world." I have heard the sentiment expressed in many ways, but I have often thought I like Mary's way best.

I want to tell what he was like as I saw him and knew him, but I find myself wondering to what I may compare him so that those who never saw him may understand.

His portraits tell how he looked to people he passed or people he met in an ordinary way. But with what similes shall one tell how he looked when he was telling Bud's bear story or teasing Hector Fuller about " them molasses," or reading " Bianca," or reciting the veteran's tale of the man with his leg shot off, or listening from out the far-away Child-World when he asked: " Who told you? ' Hum? ' "

There was only one of him, but that one was so various! " How many of my selves are dead? " He questions in one of his poems. But however many he may have felt behind him, he had at all times enough left him to furnish a regiment of ordinary men with personality.

I hope I have not conveyed the impression that the moods which I have quoted were ever-present with him, nor even that they were his most frequent states of mind. They would have been far less 'witching had they been perpetual, or easy of access. In truth, they were so far from evocable at will—either his will or the wish of others—that they were all the more precious when the gods of the soul's winds blew favor­ing breaths.

So sensitive a creature was prey to ten thousand torments, from within and from without, as well as attuned to ten thousand delights. his body, as completely as his spirit, seemed to present infinite exposed nerve " surfaces, which shot tingling pain through him when they were ever so lightly brushed. He was often irritable; and his irritability had a tendency to aban­don the sullen defensive and become actively, stingingly mean. 'What he said and did at such times caused him agonies of remorse afterwards. I can never forget some of the things he said to me about this terrible contrition he was for­ever suffering. It was one of the major tragedies of his temperament.

IIe was so sensitive to self-criti­cism that I think he had less susceptibility than the average to criti­cism from without.

Sifers " was appearing in The Century, some tender paragrapher in a California weekly howled: " That plague of bucolic imbecility, James Whitcomb Riley, has broke loose in The Century again." Something in one of his letters made me think he had seen this and been hurt by it. I ventured upon such consolation as my twenty-year-old bitter­ness with the crass world could muster. I daresay he was much amused, but he did not say so.

"This is no letter at all," he wrot, "only a long-distance clapping of hands over your lovely Revelation of Christopher' [a short story, just published)—yes, and the fine, strong, heartening letter I'd been silently applauding since its inspired ores"- tion on the nth; for even a full day prior to its arrival the spirit of it smote me like a sort of anonymous glory. Of course I shall never be able to thank you for it—though certain I am that you already know the righteous sense of my appreciation. But you must not think it is 'the oft-recurring gnat '—the rabidly erudite little critic you so recently was afflicted with—that vexes me seriously at all. I'm the fellow that gets after me the most effectively and relentlessly. Now, however, I'm at peace even with myself again, and no end of good things are coming my way. Wish I could see you and talk some of 'em over at you!"

Another time he wrote:

" I am still so at sea under such stress of weather; my mind (such as it is) remains, as then, largely chaotic. Fact is, the youth and elasticity is gone clean out of it, and it now seems to fit the demand like the slack, limp lasting of an old shoe. Have been trying to rest it, but the graceless thing is beyond remedy, I really believe. In meantime, how flourishes your own art-labors? Can you yet, as Miss Afurfree said to me jocosely of her sister [" Charles Egbert Craddock "H' write a novel with your hat on and a parasol under your arm '7'

How shall one make plain to any contented, cornfed citizen the super-tragedy of that " slack, limp " mind and the feeling that " youth and elasticity is gone clean out of it "? If one has never thrilled to the wonder-workings of such a mind, never known the magic which evoked

"The music of the laughing lip, the lustre of the eye;
The childish faith in fairies and Aladdin's magic ring
The simple, soul-reposing, glad belief in everything.—
When life was like a story, bolding neither sob nor sigh,
In the golden, olden glory of the days gone by,"

How shall he know the desolation of having forgot the " Sesame "? Nor is the despair of each lapse less abysmal because in that tiny, un‑
invaded corner of the mind's kingdom where a remnant of memory is still regnant, there is a counsellor to remind one that on other occasions he seemed equally conquered, yet came forth in triumph. " Ah, yes! but I was younger, then. This time my exile is for all eternity."

If it was disappointing to his family and friends that he was unable, at times, to unlock the gates of that world where he was a fairy Prince-Charming — youthful and all-conquering—what must it not have been to him to stand out­side, an old man in a beggar's cloak?

If ever I was impatient with him on that account, he knows, now, what my contrition is—and has forgiven me. His contrition was always charm­ing, and he never withheld it. " It was my plumbing' with one phrase of [the preface of] your Golden Year that scarred its grammar. You had said that Mr. Riley (himself) ' might say " nailer in " ' and I tried to correct the inference as to your suggestion that my grammar was no better than my old farmer's. So it seems, after all, you were right, and God knows the pang it gives me to admit it."

His sensitiveness to being thought colloquial by restriction and not by choice, was very considerable. Whether people liked or did not like what he did, he wanted them to know that it was done with painstaking effort by a man who expressed much in homely or child-simple language not because that was his only speech, but because he had an artist's sense of the way certain ideas should be set forth. He had a scholarly knowledge of verse forms and a facile command of them, equaled by few poets of any day. He used words with the artistry of a lapidary; and he was as much at ease with the richest, most sensuous words as Swinburne, while commanding the simplest with a mastery like that of Burns.

When my first novel was in manu­script, he read it with painstaking particularity, and wrote me a letter thousands of words in length, con­taining his comments and sugges­tions and corrections. I remember discussing some of these with Pro­fessor William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, who was much interested in Mr. Riley's attitude toward certain words. Sometimes one could share his feeling about words, and again it was not possible; but it was al­ways interesting to hear how words affected him. For instance: " Don't use trudge! it is a horrid, patro­nizing word"; and "countryside is an abomination, weakly smacking of petty poetry "; and so on. Now, " trudge " is not a patronizing word; but he had an aversion from it.

And there is no equivalent for countryside " in certain usages. But he was as sensitive to the im­pression words made on him as the master-musician is to sounds. q For his dialect poetry he kept note­books as accurate as a scientist's. Not only was the euphony of the dialectics a careful study with him, but he knew why some children, for instance, say " thist " instead of " just," and why others say " ist." There was nothing hap­hazard in any of his work. The philologist of the future, studying Middle-Western colloquialisms of the late-nineteenth century, may depend on Riley's transcription of them as the most exact ever made.

" Yesterday," one of his letters begins, " I dined merrily with the sister and her Eitelian family; and along with the dessert came Ed's and Elizabeth's letters from you. Nor could the exacting literary peptics of the epicurean old-fool uncle find but one vaguest savor in either missive to be just a trifle squeamish over—i.e.: in one of them you said you never punned —yet with a brazen pun both before and after the assertion. And then—all to myself—I sniffed and said, ' Ito-ho!' And then—employing the same discreet voice—I said ' Ah-ha! ' as one belike whose slowly wakening mind ' beat time to nothing in his bead from some odd corner of the brain: And then . . . Of course the folks never knew or cared about some hasty note I gravely set down on an envelope; but it was:

In jousts of old, with couchant quill, A poet and compiless met
The verse't of punsters erer yet!
And punned, and laughed just fit to kill!­And—fact is—she's a laughlin' still! "

He loved to play with words—as when he said he had gloated over something " till my epigloatis is 'most bust." And he had a fancy for such incongruous associations as when he assured me that another something was " what Theocritus would call a peach.' "

After my first book was published he wrote:

" For a long, sad while I was afraid you meant to shy out of it [authorship] and be lured into being simply the pro­ducer of the ever-prone-to-fly-upward-and­wink-out ward scintillations of the day and hour. Now, you see, you're a 'bedient child of the gods; and, as such, they'll always be good to you—henceforward ever­more! Nods and becks and wreathed smiles

As you delight 'em
Ad infinitum."

When^— his biography began tobe talked of, and he was directing the gathering together of materials for it, I was asked to loan his letters to me, for copying. He wrote:

" Thank you for the letters my biographer wants. He has astounded me with his collection of like matter from literary friends in all corners of the world, it would seem . . . As to your own,—they have all been preserved—most of them in one place of security, though some few elsewhere adrift are no less secure, and all can