“At the swellest place in town, the Bellman House ...  Walsh will charge me.”  Walsh Summers was the proprietor.

* * * * *

Big, fat Walsh welcomed me and Travers.

“No, Johnnie, I won’t charge you.  Instead, you and Jack are dining as guests of the house.”

And he would have it no other way.

* * * * *

Ally Merton was right about appearances.  To have your shirts laundered regularly makes a man a different being.  People that only noticed me before with a sort of surreptitious mockery now began to treat me with surprised respect.  Professors invited me even more—­the more conservative of them—­to dine at their homes.

And it was delightful to have living quarters where there was both hot and cold running water.  I took a cold bath, every morning, after my exercise, and a hot bath, every night, before going to bed.

The place was well-heated, too.  I no longer had to sit up in bed, the covers drawn to my chin to keep from freezing, while I read, studied, wrote.  Nor did I need sit on my hands, in alternation, to keep one warm while I rhymed with the other, during those curious spells of inspiration, those times of ecstasy—­occurring mostly in the night—­when I would write and write so rapidly that morning would find me often not able to decipher the greater part of what I had written ... five or ten poems in a night ... scrawled madly almost like automatic writing....

* * * * *

William Jennings Bryan came to talk to us at our school auditorium.  His lecture, The Prince of Peace, soon degenerated into an old-fashioned attack on science and the evolutionary theory.

The professors sat bored and mute on the platform beside him, while he evacuated the forty-year-old wheeze of “your great-great-great-grandfather might have been a monkey, but, thank God, mine was not!” he won the usual great response of handclapping and laughter with this....

And then he held out a glass of water, to prove that miracles might happen, because God, being omnipotent, could, at will, suspend natural laws.

“Look at this glass of water.  I hold it out at arm’s length, so.  If I did not hold it, it would drop to the floor and shatter into pieces.  Thus I, by a human act, suspend the law of gravitation ... so God!—­” There was huzzaing and applause.  Several professors uneasily shifted the crossing of their knees ... one or two stared diplomatically at the ceiling.

I grew angry and sent forth several sharp hisses before I knew what I was doing ... the effect was an electric stillness for the moment.  Then a roar of indignant applause drowned my protest.  And I stopped and remained quiet, with much craning of necks about me, to look at me.

As the crowd poured out, I ran out into the road, from group to group, and, wherever I found a professor walking along, I vociferated my protest at our allowing such a back-water performance at the State’s supposed centre of intelligence.