Rather the big Morgan, who knew the old masters as well as he knew the weaknesses of men ... who hobnobbed, not as a democrat, but as aristocratic as the best of them, with princes, kings, emperors, in his grim, forbidding dignity.
This at least presented bigness and romance!
"Want to meet Uncle Bill?" and Mackworth led me into a close-shut room blue-thick with smoke....
I coughed and choked. A fire extinguisher should have preceded our entry.
There sat—the lumbering trot of his typewriter heard long before he assumed visible, hazy outline—William Struthers, known to the newspaper world as "Old Uncle Bill," the writer of daily prose-verse squibs on the homely virtues, the exalter of the commonplaces of life, the deifier of the ordinary.
Uncle Bill's head of strong, black hair stood upright like thick wire. His thick, stubby fingers trotted like cart horses on and on. He stopped and drew up a chair for me.
"Of course I ain't calling my stuff poetry," he began deprecatingly, "but I do a lot of good for folks ... folks read my stuff when they ain't got time to read the real poets."
Instead of flattering him, I gave him, frankly but gently, my opinion of the cornfed school of literature, easing the sting by inferring that he without doubt had bigger things up his sleeve than his so-called prose poems.
What I said struck the right chord.