, but it astonished him to find that Mr. Keeler knew what a
sonnet was. The little bookkeeper occasionally surprised him by breaking
out unexpectedly in that way.

From the indiscriminate praise at home, or the reluctant praise of his
grandfather, he found relief when he discussed his verses with Helen
Kendall. Her praise was not indiscriminate, in fact sometimes she
did not praise at all, but expressed disapproval. They had some
disagreements, marked disagreements, but it did not affect their
friendship. Albert was a trifle surprised to find that it did not.

So as the months passed he ground away at the books of Z. Snow and
Company during office hours and at the poetry mill between times. The
seeing of his name in print was no longer a novelty and he poetized not
quite as steadily. Occasionally he attempted prose, but the two or three
short stories of his composition failed to sell. Helen, however, urged
him to try again and keep trying. "I know you can write a good story and
some day you are going to," she said.

His first real literary success, that which temporarily lifted him into
the outer circle of the limelight of fame, was a poem written the day
following that upon which came the news of the sinking of the Lusitania.
Captain Zelotes came back from the post-office that morning, a crumpled
newspaper in his hand, and upon his face the look which mutinous
foremast hands had seen there just before the mutiny ended. Laban Keeler
was the first to notice the look. "For the land sakes, Cap'n, what's
gone wrong?" he asked. The captain flung the paper upon the desk. "Read
that," he grunted. Labe slowly spread open the paper; the big black
headlines shrieked the crime aloud.

"Good God Almighty!" exclaimed the little bookkeeper. Captain Zelotes
snorted. "He didn't have anything to do with it," he declared. "The
bunch that pulled that off was handled from the other end of the line.
And I wish to thunder I was young enough to help send 'em back there,"
he added, savagely.

That evening Albert wrote his poem. The next day he sent it to a Boston
paper. It was published the following morning, spread across two columns
on the front page, and before the month was over had been copied widely
over the country. Within the fortnight its author received his first
request, a bona fida request for verse from a magazine. Even Captain
Lote's praise of the Lusitania poem was whole-hearted and ungrudging.

That summer was a busy one