* * * * *

The weather was warm again.  My next to my last college year was drawing to a close.  Not that I was a graduate ... my course was a special one, and I had not followed even that closely.

“If you’ll graduate,” Jarvis Alexander Mackworth urged me, joking in the Kansas fashion, “I will present you with a great bouquet of beauty roses....  I’d like to see you vindicate Langworth’s and my judgment of you.  For you have many, many professors and people on the Hill who don’t believe in you, and, frankly,—­say it was a mistake ever to have let you in.”

Mackworth was one of the regents of the school.

“In fact, once one of the professors rose, at a meeting, ably reinforced by several others, to complain that you were actually crazy, and a detriment to the school.”

“And what did you say, Mr. Mackworth, didn’t you defend me?”

“Yes, God pity me, I did,” he jested.  “I remembered how I was asked to quit here, too.  In the days when General Fred Furniss was also looked on as an unruly, rather undesirable member of the student body ... we were classmates....

“I replied that no doubt you were crazy, you starry young tramp, you!... but that I wished some of the professors shared a little of your virus ... it might make them more alive and interesting.”

Again I was absolutely starvation-ridden.  Several tramp-poems that I sold to Everybody’s kept me literally in bread and cheese for a month.  I was still madly in love with Vanna at long distance.

There came an opportunity for me to make a few dollars and to show off before her, at the same time.

The Copperwell Street Show came to town.  They lined the main street with booths, and outside of town, in a large pasture, circus tents were pitched, in which the usual one-ringed circus was to be shown ... and they had six lions in a cage ... advertised as Nubian lions, the largest and fiercest of their kind ... their trainer never going in among them except at peril of his life.  A gold medal was offered to anyone who would go in among the lions alone, and make a speech to the audience from the inside of the cage.

I negotiated with the management, but asked for the medal’s equivalent in money.  I was offered twenty-five dollars if I would go in, and repeat my speech, each one of the three nights the show would be held.

I was to go in for the first time that very night ... to clinch my lagging resolution, the story was printed in the local papers....

“JOHN GREGORY TIRED OF LIFE
------------------------
KANSAS POET TO TALK AMONG LIONS,”

Jack Travers was at his facetious best.

Considering myself heroic, and thinking with inner joy how Vanna Andrews would be there, I spent the day in committing to memory the salient points on the nature and habits of lions, from the Encyclopedia Britannica....

People looked at me both with amusement and admiring amazement as they saw me about, late that afternoon....