hat winter along with a lot of other syndicate
matter, and the grammatical construction of the story was so faulty
that the managing editor had several times called on me to edit the
copy. In this way I had read it very carefully, and through the
careless sentence-structure I saw the wonder of that remarkable
performance. But the grammar certainly was bad. I remember one of
the reporters who had corrected the phrase "it don't" for the tenth
time remarked savagely, "If I couldn't write better English than
this, I'd quit."

Crane spent several days in the town, living from hand to mouth and
waiting for his money. I think he borrowed a small amount from the
managing editor. He lounged about the office most of the time, and I
frequently encountered him going in and out of the cheap restaurants
on Tenth Street. When he was at the office he talked a good deal in
a wandering, absent-minded fashion, and his conversation was
uniformly frivolous. If he could not evade a serious question by a
joke, he bolted. I cut my classes to lie in wait for him, confident
that in some unwary moment I could trap him into serious
conversation, that if one burned incense long enough and ardently
enough, the oracle would not be dumb. I was Maupassant mad at the
time, a malady particularly unattractive in a Junior, and I made a
frantic effort to get an expression of opinion from him on "Le
Bonheur." "Oh, you're Moping, are you?" he remarked with a sarcastic
grin, and went on reading a little volume of Poe that he carried in
his pocket. At another time I cornered him in the Funny Man's room
and succeeded in getting a little out of him. We were taught
literature by an exceedingly analytical method at the University,
and we probably distorted the method, and I was busy trying to find
the least common multiple of _Hamlet_ and the greatest common
divisor of _Macbeth_, and I began asking him whether stories were
constructed by cabalistic formulae. At length he sighed wearily and
shook his drooping shoulders, remarking:

"Where did you get all that rot? Yarns aren't done by mathematics.
You can't do it by rule any more than you can dance by rule. You
have to have the itch of the thing in your fingers, and if you
haven't,--well, you're damned lucky, and you'll live long and
prosper, that's all."--And with that he yawned and went down the
hall.

Crane was moody most of the time, his health was bad and he seemed
profoundly discouraged. Even his jokes we