receipt from his eye.

Then I am going to pay my letter's bill at the Bellevue-Stratford, buy a
three dollar ticket to New York and a place in the Pullman for myself, G.
S. L. on return, as the human envelope Mr. Burleson has required me to
be, ship myself back to New York as the empty, as the container this
article came in, and one more intimate painful twelve dollars and
thirty-seven cents worth of an eighteen-cent experience with Albert
Sidney Burleson will be over.

Last time I did this I was early for my train at the Pennsylvania Station
and walked out at the Eighth Avenue end, looked up wistfully at Mr.
Burleson's new Greek Palace he puts up in when he comes to New York and I
came with deep feeling upon the following Beautiful Emotion Mr. Burleson
has about himself--four or five hundred feet of it, in letters four feet
high all across the top.

NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT, NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS
FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS.

Of course I realized in a minute that this was said by Herodotus, or
Homer or somebody, and was intended as a courteous reference probably to
camels and not as would be supposed to Burleson and his forty thousand
mighty locomotives hurrying his orders up and down three thousand miles
of sunsets across the land.

But I must say that what Herodotus claimed for the camels when I read it
as I did that day in huge marble letters four feet high from Thirtieth to
Thirty-second Street, seemed just a little boastful for Mr. Burleson as I
stood there and gazed at it holding tight my letter in my hand I was
spending twenty-four hours and twelve dollars to keep him from mailing
for me.

XVII

THE MAN FIFTY-THREE THOUSAND POST OFFICES FAILED ON

There is one thing I find when I am writing in a national magazine,
trying to express myself on an idea I would like to believe but do not
want to be fooled about, to four or five million people. I can not help
feeling that out of all these four or five million people, at the very
least anyway there really must be three million and five hundred thousand
who are being very much less fooled about me and about my idea than I am.
Every day as I sit down to write one more chapter I try to catch up to
them. Of course anybody can see I am not equal to it, but it does give
one a chance, and it gives the book a chance before I am through, to have
some sense in it.

I cannot help thinking what Albert Sidney Burl