* * * * *

Langworth enrolled me as a special student.  He himself paid my tuition fee, which was a nominal one.  I enrolled in Philosophy, Economics, German, Latin.

My patron, furthermore, slipped a ten-dollar bill into my hand.  “For the books you will need.”

He directed me to the Y.M.C.A. employment bureau.  “They will see that you get work at something, so you can be sure of board and room ... in the early days we did not have things so well arranged.  I worked my way through college, too.  I nearly perished, my first year.  After you settle somewhere, come and see me once in a while and let me hear how you’re getting on.”

* * * * *

My first job was milking a cow and taking care of a horse, for board and room....  The man for whom I worked was an old, retired farmer.

The disagreeable part of taking care of horses and cows is the smell.  My clothes, my room, even the skin of my body, soon reeked with the faint yet penetrating odour of stable and barn.

But I was happy.  Many great men had done as I was doing.  Always trust me to dramatise every situation!

I arranged my meagre row of text-books on the shelf in my attic.  I set Keats apart in a sacred nook by himself.

I sat humming softly to myself, studying my first lessons.

* * * * *

“Look,” cried a girl, her voice vibrating with the hard sarcasm of youth, “look, there goes Abe Lincoln,” to another girl and two boys, who lolled with her on the porch of the house next mine.

I was stabbed with a bitter pang of resentment.  For my face was thin and weather-beaten ... my sharp, bent knees never straightened as I walked along, like a man going through snow drifts.  Yet I held my head erect, ridiculously erect ... and my chest was enormous through over-development, as my arms and legs were thin.

* * * * *

My first few days at Laurel University brought me that beginning of newspaper notoriety that has since followed me everywhere as a shadow goes with a moving object.  And then originated the appellation which has since clung to me, that of “The Vagabond Poet.”

One morning, when I was hardly awake, there came a knock at my door.

“Just a moment,” I called, getting into my shirt and trousers, “who is it?”

“A reporter to interview you.”

I opened the door to admit a pale, young chap, who expertly flirted the ashes off a cigarette as he said, leaning his head sidewise, that he represented the Kansas City Star.  As he spoke his keen grey eyes looked me over impartially, but with intelligent, friendly interest.  Though he was dressed in the student’s conventional style, even to the curiously nicked and clipped soft hat then predominant, there was still about him an off-handedness, an impudent at-homeness that bespoke a wider knowledge, or assumed knowledge, of the world, than the average student possesses.