“I’m going to be an author,” answered Fudge earnestly.
“That’s another of those well-paid professions. Guess what we’d better do is make a date to meet in the poor house in, say, twenty or thirty years!”
“Some authors make a lot of money,” said Fudge.
“Do they? Maybe so. The only one I ever knew who had money in his pocket was a chap out in Laredo. Don’t know as you’d call him an author exactly either; more of a poet. He traveled around on side-door Pullmans and sold poems at the houses. Said he was ‘singing his way around the world.’ Told me he sometimes got as much as fifty cents for a poem. Yes, he was what you might call a right successful author; one of those ‘best-sellers’ you hear about, I guess.”
“What were the poems like?” asked Fudge.
“Well, I don’t believe, between you and me and the shovel, he had more than the one, and that—let me see if I can remember it. How was it now? ‘My name is——’ I used to know that song, too. Wait a minute. I’ve got it!
“‘My name is James O’Reilly,
I come from Erin’s sod
To sing my humble ballads