ve participant in all worthy movements to
raise hell--as they admirably described it. By the end of his Freshman
year he had given up all attempts to be a poet and to extract
nourishment from the college classes, which were as hard and unpalatable
as dried codfish. He got drunk, he vented his energy in noisy meetings
with itinerant _filles de joie_, who were as provincial and rustic, as
bewildered and unfortunate as the wild country boys, who in them found
their only outlet for youth's madness. Walter was abruptly expelled from
college by the one man in the college whom he respected--the saintly
president, who had dreams of a new Harvard on the prairies.

So Walter Babson found himself at twenty-one an outcast. He
declaimed--though no one would believe him--that all the gentle souls he
had ever encountered were weak; all the virile souls vicious or
suspicious.

He drifted. He doubted himself, and all the more noisily asserted his
talent and the injustice of the world. He looked clean and energetic and
desirous, but he had nothing on which to focus. He became an active but
careless reporter on newspapers in Wichita, Des Moines, Kansas City, St.
Louis, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Between times he sold
real-estate and insurance and sets of travel books, for he had no pride
of journalism; he wanted to keep going and keep interested and make
money and spend it; he wanted to express himself without trying to find
out what his self was.

It must be understood that, for all his vices, Walter was essentially
clean and kindly. He rushed into everything, the bad with the good. He
was not rotten with heavy hopelessness; though he was an outcast from
his home, he was never a pariah. Not Walter, but the smug, devilish
cities which took their revenues from saloon-keeping were to blame when
he turned from the intolerable dullness of their streets to the
excitement of alcohol in the saloons and brothels which they made so
much more amusing than their churches and parlors.

Everywhere in the Western newspaper circles Walter heard stories of
Californians who had gone East and become geniuses the minute they
crossed the Hudson.... Walter also went East and crossed the Hudson, but
he did not become a genius. If there had been an attic to starve in, he
would have starved in one, but as New York has nothing so picturesque,
he starved in furnished rooms instead, while he wrote "special stories"
for Sunday newspapers, and collected