“A few days later I came suddenly upon the face again. The very incongruity of its alliance with laughter overwhelmed me, and wonderingly I read what he had written, not once, but every day, always with the handicap of that half-tone. If Cobb were an older man, I would go on the witness stand and swear that the photograph was made when he was witnessing the Custer Massacre or the passing of Geronimo through the winter quarters of his enemies. Notwithstanding, he supplied my week’s laughter.
“Digression this:
“After Bret Harte died, many stories were written by San Franciscans who knew him when he first put in an appearance on the Pacific Coast. One contemporary described minutely how Bret would come silently up the stairs of the old Alta office, glide down the dingy hallway through the exchange room, and seat himself at the now historic desk. It took Bret fifteen minutes to sharpen a lead pencil, one hour for sober reflection, and three hours to write a one-stick paragraph, after which he would carefully tear it up, gaze out of the window down the Golden Gate, and go home.
“He repeated this formula the following day, and at the end of the week succeeded in turning out three or four sticks which he considered fit to print. In later years, after fame had sought him out and presented him with a fur-lined overcoat, which I am bound to say Bret knew how to wear, the files of the Alta were ransacked for the pearls he had dropped in his youth. A few gems were identified, a very few. Beside this entire printed collection the New England Primer would have looked like a set of encyclopedias. Bret worked slowly, methodically, brilliantly, and is an imperishable figure in American letters.
“Returning to Cobb: He has already written twenty times more than Bret Harte turned out during his entire career. He has made more people laugh and written better short stories. He has all of Harte’s subtle and delicate feeling, and will, if he is spared, write better novels about the people of today than Bret Harte, with all his genius and imagination, wrote around the Pioneers. I know of no single instance where one man has shown such fecundity and quality as Irvin Cobb has so far evinced, and it is my opinion that his complete works at fifty will contain more good humour, more good short stories, and at least one bigger novel than the works of any other single contemporaneous figure.
“He was born in Paducah, Kentucky, in June, ’76. I have taken occasion to look into the matter and find that his existence was peculiarly varied. He belonged to one of those old Southern families-there being no new Southern families—and passed through the public schools sans incident. At the age of sixteen he went into the office of The Paducah Daily News as a reportorial cub.
“He was first drawn to daily journalism because he yearned to be an illustrator. Indeed, he went so far as to write local humorous stories, illustrating them himself. The pictures must have been pretty bad, although they served to keep people from saying that his literature was the worst thing in the paper.
“Resisting all efforts of the editor, the stockholders and the subscribers of The Paducah Daily News, he remained barricaded behind his desk until his nineteenth year, when he was crowned with a two-dollar raise and a secondary caption under his picture which read ‘The Youngest Managing Editor of a Daily Paper in the United States.’
“If Cobb was consulted in the matter of this review, he would like to have these preliminaries expunged from his biography. But the public is entitled to the details.
“It is also true that he stacked up more libel suits than a newspaper of limited capital with a staff of local attorneys could handle before he moved to Louisville, where, for three years, he was staff correspondent of The Evening Post. It was here that Cobb discovered how far a humorist could go without being invited to step out at 6 a.m. and rehearse ‘The Rivals’ with real horse-pistols.