But whatever became of it after it fell into his hands, I received no reply. I waited five days, during which time I stayed in the house rather than go out wearing the Whittier gray derby. On the sixth day I wrote him again, as follows:
Cambridge, Mass.
Nov. 14, 1890.Dear Mr. Whittier:
How about that hat of mine?
Yours respectfully,
ROBERT C. BENCHLEY.
I received no answer to this letter either. Concluding that the good gray poet was either too busy or too gosh-darned mean to bother with the thing, I myself adopted an attitude of supercilious unconcern and closed the correspondence with the following terse message:
Cambridge, Mass.
December 4, 1890.Dear Mr. Whittier:
It is my earnest wish that the hat of mine which you are keeping will slip down over your eyes some day, interfering with your vision to such an [pg 007]extent that you will walk off the sidewalk into the gutter and receive painful, albeit superficial, injuries.
Your young friend,
ROBERT C. BENCHLEY.
Here the matter ended so far as I was concerned, and I trust that biographers in the future will not let any confusion of motives or misunderstanding of dates enter into a clear and unbiased statement of the whole affair. We must not have another Shelley-Byron scandal.[pg 008]