ven't taken a single note!" I protested.

"I have it all here, in my head."

"But how can you report me accurately?"

"See to-morrow's _Sun_."

* * * * *

The interview with me was a marvel in two ways: it represented to a
hair's breadth everything I had pronounced, transmuted into the
reporter's own style of writing ... it curtailed my conversation where I
had repeated myself or wandered off into trivial detail.

* * * * *

"I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas!" I had exclaimed to Hildreth,
in the hearing of the reporters.

"Oh, bother Kansas!" replied Hildreth humorously.

For a month "I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas" was a catch-word
for Broadway and the town.

When the _Evening Journal_ put us in their "Dingbat Family" I enjoyed
the humour of it. But Hildreth was angry and aggrieved.

"You and Penton," remarked she, "for men of culture and sensibility,
have bigger blind spots than ordinary in your make-up. Why, Johnnie, I
believe you enjoy the comic pictures about this business!...

"The only way to conduct propaganda for a cause is through the dignified
medium of books, I am rapidly becoming convinced--not through newspaper
interviews; which, when they are not silly, are insulting."

* * * * *

Baxter's lawyer soon put a stop to our public amicability ...
"collusion," he warned Penton; "they'll call it collusion and you won't
get your final decree."

Tad drew cartoons of us ... a cluster of them ... "_Silk Hat Harry's
Divorce Suit_" ... with dogs' heads on all of us ... Hildreth, with the
head of a hound dog, long hound-ears flopping, with black jade ear-rings
in them ... Penton, a woe-begone little pug....

A box car loomed in the centre of the main picture, "_The Affinity Nest
of the Hobo Poet_," I think it was legended ... then I was drawn
standing, one leg crossed over the other, the peak of the toe jauntily
resting on the ground, hand-in-breast like an old-fashioned picture.
There was a tin can thrown over the shoulder of the tattered bulldog
that represented me ... one of my ears went through my hat ... beneath,
a rhyme ran:

"I am the hobo poet,
I lead a merry life:
One day I woo the Muse, the next,
Another fellow's wife!"

* * * * *

I brought this up to the cottage we had now procured, down in West
Grove, N.J., where we had gone fina