e.... It could not be possible! but it seemed to be
inscribed with the name of a novelist famous for his investigations of
capitalistic abuses of the people ... the author of the sensational
novel, _The Slaughter House_, which was said to out-Zola Zola--Penton
Baxter.

I hurried downstairs from my attic, to intercept some friend who would
confirm me in my interpretation of the signature.

It was Travers I ran into. I showed the letter to him.

"By Jove! It _is_ Baxter!" he cried.

He was as overwhelmed as I had been.

"Say, Johnnie, you must really amount to something, with all these
people back East paying such attention to you ... come on into Kuhlman's
and have a "coke" with me."

In Kuhlman's, the college foregathering place, the ice cream and
refreshment parlour of the town, we joined with Jimmy Thompson, our
famous football quarterback. The room was full of students eating ice
cream and drinking coco-cola and ice cream sodas.

"Say, let me print this."

"No, but you may put an item in the _Laurelian_, if you want to."

"I must write a story for the _Star_ about it."

It would have pleased my vanity to have had Jack put the story in the
papers, but I was afraid of offending Baxter ... afterward I learned
that it would not have offended him ... he had the vanity of a child, as
well as I.

I answered his letter promptly, in terms of what might have seemed, to
the outside eye, excessive adulation. But Penton Baxter was to me a
great genius ... and nothing I could have written in his praise would
have overweighed the debt I owed him for that fine letter of
encouragement.

* * * * *

So at last I was reaping the fruits of my years of struggle for the
poetic ideal--my years of poverty and suffering.

A belated student at college, twenty-five years of age ... a tramp for
the sake of my art ... as I sat in my cold room ... propped up by my one
overturned chair ... in bed ... betaking myself there to keep from
freezing while I wrote and dreamed and read and studied,--I burst out
singing some of my own verses, making the tune to the lines as I went
along.

"John Gregory, you are a great man, and some day all the world shall
know and acknowledge it!" I said over and over again to myself....

"And now, Vanna, my love, my darling," I cried aloud, so that if anyone
overheard, the auditor would think I was going mad, "now, Vanna, you
shall see ... in a year I shall have my first