he first page
of a manuscript; its lively little symposia, by such successful
market-gardeners of literature as Mamie Stuyvesant Blupp and Bill Brown
and Dr. J. F. Fitzneff, on the inspiring subject of whether it paid
better to do filler verse for cheap magazines, or long verse for the big
magazines. At the end, this almost madly idealistic journal gave a list
of wants of editors; the editor of _Lingerie and Laughter_ wanted
"short, snappy stuff with a kick in it; especially good yarns about
models, grisettes, etc." _Wanderlust_ was in the market for "stories
with a punch that appealed to every red-blooded American; nothing about
psychology, problems, Europe, or love wanted." _The Plymouth Rock
Fancier_ announced that it could use "a good, lively rural poem every
week; must be clean and original."

Pathos there was in all of this; the infinitely little men and women
daring to buy and sell "short, snappy stuff" in this somber and terribly
beautiful world of Balzac and Wells and Turgenieff. And pathos there was
in that wasted year when Walter Babson sought to climb from the
gossiping little prairie town to the grandeur of great capitals by
learning to be an efficient manufacturer of "good, lively rural poems."
He neglected even his college-entrance books, the Ruskin whose clots of
gilt might have trained him to look for real gold, and the stilted Burke
who might have given him a vision of empires and races and social
destinies. And for his pathetic treachery he wasn't even rewarded. His
club-footed verses were always returned with printed rejection slips.

When at last he barely slid into Jonathan Edwards College, Iowa, Walter
was already becoming discouraged; already getting the habit of blaming
the gods, capitalists, editors, his father, the owner of the country
newspaper on which he had been working, for everything that went wrong.
He yammered destructive theories which would have been as obnoxious to a
genuine fighting revolutionist as they were sacrilegious to his
hard-fisted, earnest, rustic classmates in Jonathan Edwards. For Walter
was not protesting against social injustice. The slavery of
rubber-gatherers in the Putumayo and of sweatshop-workers in New York
did not exist for him. He was protesting because, at the age of twenty,
his name was not appearing in large flattering capitals on the covers of
magazines.

Yet he was rather amusing; he helped plodding classmates with their
assignments, and he was an acti