l like writing a few poems for
me I may be able to use them as fillers, and they may help to make your
name so well known in Hades that next year I shall be able to print a
Worldly Letter from you every week with a good chance of its proving
popular."

And with this promise Boswell left me to get out the first number of The
Cimmerian: a Sunday Magazine for all. Taking him at his word, I sent him
the following poem a few days later:

LOCALITY

Whither do we drift,
Insensate souls, whose every breath
Foretells the doom of nothingness?
Yet onward, upward let it be
Through all the myriad circles
Of the ensuing years--
And then, pray what?
Alas! 'tis all, and never shall be stated.
Atoms, yet atomless we drift,
But whitherward?

I had intended this for one of our leading magazines, but it seemed
so to lack the mystical quality, which is essential to a successful
magazine poem in our sphere, that I deemed it best to try it on Boswell.

VI. THE BOSWELL TOURS: PERSONALLY CONDUCTED

It was and will no doubt be considered, even by those who are not too
friendly towards myself, a daring idea, and it was all my own. One
night, several weeks after the interview with Boswell just narrated, the
idea came to me simultaneously with the first tapping of the keys for
the evening upon the Enchanted Type-Writer. It was Boswell's touch that
summoned me from my divan. My family were on the eve of departure for
a month's rest from care and play in the mountains, and I was
looking forward to a period of very great loneliness. But as Boswell
materialized and began his work upon the machine, the great idea flashed
across my mind, and I resolved to "play it" for all it was worth.

"Jim," said I, as I approached the vacant chair in which he sat--for
by this time the great biographer and I had got upon terms of
familiarity--"Jim," said I, "I've got a very gloomy prospect ahead of
me."

"Well, why not?" he tapped off. "Where do you expect to have your gloomy
prospects? They can't very well be behind you."

"Humph!" said I. "You are facetious this evening."

"Not at all," he replied. "I have been spending the day with my old-time
boss, Samuel Johnson, and I am so saturated with purism that I hardly
know where I am. From the Johnsonian point of view you have expressed
yourself ill--"

"Well, I am ill," I retorted. "I don't know how far you are acquainted
with home life, but I do