“Oh, after I came back from Europe I was busted, and had to go to work. I met Stanley Waterloo about that time, and his talk induced me to go to work for the ‘Journal’ as a 200 reporter. I soon got to be city editor, but I didn’t like it. I liked to have fun with people. I liked to have my fun as I went along. About this time I married the sister of the friend who went with me to Europe, and feeling my new responsibilities, I went up to St. Joseph as city editor.” He mused for a moment in silence. “It was terrific hard work, but I wouldn’t give a good deal for those two years.”
“Have you ever drawn upon them for material?” asked Garland with a novelist’s perception of their possibilities.
“No, but I may some time. Things have to get pretty misty before I can use ’em. I’m not like you fellows,” he said, referring to the realists. “I got thirty dollars a week; wasn’t that princely?”
“Nothing else, but you earned it, no doubt.”
“Earned it? Why, Great Scott! I did the whole business except turning the handle of the press.
“Well, in 1877 I was called back to the ‘Journal’ in St. Louis, as editorial writer of paragraphs. That was the beginning of my own line of work.”
“When did you do your first work in verse?” asked Garland.
The tall man brought his feet down to the floor with a bang and thrust his hand out toward his friend. “There! I’m glad you said verse. For heaven’s sake don’t ever say I call my stuff poetry. I never do. I don’t pass judgment on it like that.” After a little he resumed. “The first that I wrote was ‘Christmas Treasures.’ I wrote that one night to fill in a chink in the paper.”
“Give me a touch of it?” asked his friend.
He chewed his cigar in the effort to remember. “I don’t read it much. I put it with the collection for the sake of old times.” He read a few lines of it, and read it extremely well, before returning to his history.