Then Frank and Ed. retailed to me the practical jokes they had played on each other since I had been gone from among them ... on big Sam, the chocolate-coloured shoemaker who had his shop next door ... and an obscene one on a half-wit named Elmer, who was one of Frank’s helpers ... that, though it was pretty raw, made me choke and gasp with merriment ... and they told me how, one night, they had wired the iron roof in the back, so that about ten cats that were mewling and quarrelling there, received a severe electric shock ... how funny and surprised they’d acted.

* * * * *

Most serviceably a check from the National Magazine came, for twenty-five dollars ...  I had sold them a prophetic poem on airships.  The check ameliorated my condition.  I saw my way clear to a few weeks more of regular eating.

* * * * *

Then, on top of that, one day a telegram came....

“Am on my way West.  Will stop off visit you at Laurel—­Penton.”

* * * * *

Travers rushed the story to the Kansas City Star.

“KANSAS POET HONOURED
------------------------
AUTHOR OF ‘SLAUGHTER HOUSE’ TO VISIT HIM”

I waited in a fever of eagerness and impatience for the arrival of this man whom I idealised and looked on as a great man ... the man who had written the Les Miserables of the American workingman.

* * * * *

Harry Varden, editor of the Cry for Right, had been to Laurel a week previously, to address a socialist local, and I had looked him up, at the house of the “comrade” where he was passing the night.  The comrade sent me up to Varden’s room, where I found the latter just getting out of bed.  I shall always think of him in his proletarian grey woollen underdrawers and undershirt.  In which he had evidently slept.  He had the bed-habits of the masses.  And the room was stale with bad air; like the masses, he, too, slept with windows shut.

Varden’s monthly magazine The World to Be, had occasionally printed a poem of mine ... and I was paid five dollars for each poem.

Varden was a frail, jolly little chap, absolutely fearless and alert and possessed of a keen sense of humour which he could turn, on occasion, even against himself.

I breakfasted with him.  He had good table manners, but, from time to time, he forgot himself and smacked his lips keenly.  And the egg dripped on his chin as he flashed a humorous incident that had happened to him on one of his lecture trips....

After breakfast he and I took a long walk together ... we began speaking of Penton Baxter ...  I spoke in high praise of the great novelist ... reverently and with awe.

“Yes, yes,” Varden assented, “Penton is all you say, but he has no sense of humour ... and he takes himself and his work as seriously as if the destiny of the human race depended on it ... which is getting in a bad way, for a reformer, you know—­gives a chap’s enemies and antagonists so many good openings....