oms. Nor did
he fail in telling them that in me Kansas had a great poet in the making
... the professors who were not invited to my hasty reception considered
themselves slighted.

When I saw Baxter off at the station we were calling each other by our
first names.

"Good-bye, Johnnie!"

"Good-bye, Penton!"

"Don't fail to visit me at Warriors' River, this fall, if you can do so
conveniently."

I assured him that I would not fail.

For I had spoken with him of my determination to ship on the Great Lakes
for a few months, to see if I couldn't garner some poetic material for
my poems of modern life that I was writing for the _National Magazine_.

"My wife and I will be at Warriors' River till late in the fall. We're
staying at Stephen Barton's Health Home. Barton is a good friend of
mine.... I am helping him out, since he left New Jersey, where he was
forced, by a series of petty prosecutions, to give up Perfection
City.... My wife will be glad to see you ... she knows your poetry
already."

* * * * *

The weather was warm again. My next to my last college year was drawing
to a close. Not that I was a graduate ... my course was a special one,
and I had not followed even that closely.

"If you'll graduate," Jarvis Alexander Mackworth urged me, joking in the
Kansas fashion, "I will present you with a great bouquet of beauty
roses.... I'd like to see you vindicate Langworth's and my judgment of
you. For you have many, many professors and people on the Hill who don't
believe in you, and, frankly,--say it was a mistake ever to have let you
in."

Mackworth was one of the regents of the school.

"In fact, once one of the professors rose, at a meeting, ably reinforced
by several others, to complain that you were actually crazy, and a
detriment to the school."

"And what did you say, Mr. Mackworth, didn't you defend me?"

"Yes, God pity me, I did," he jested. "I remembered how I was asked to
quit here, too. In the days when General Fred Furniss was also looked on
as an unruly, rather undesirable member of the student body ... we were
classmates....

"I replied that no doubt you were crazy, you starry young tramp, you!...
but that I wished some of the professors shared a little of your virus
... it might make them more alive and interesting."

Again I was absolutely starvation-ridden. Several tramp-poems that I
sold to _Everybody's_ kept me literally in bread and cheese for a mont