bits of Shakespeare, tag ends of
poems; he snapped his fingers and flung out his arms in sheer excess of
enthusiasm. He smiled, threw back his head, even made faces at the
passersby. He boomed into a solo from an opera, and kicked his foot at a
cigar stub on the sidewalk. And had anybody wished to observe when he
reached his house, the spectacle would have presented itself of a
caricature, funny-paper barn-stormer tramping merrily up the rattling
stairs and humming, "The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, have
nothing to do with the case."

All the next day he did not leave his room, save at meal times; for he
wished to be alone and hug his exultation. To the four flat walls he
repeated snatches of the things he had done the night before; up and
down the rag carpet he smirked and grimaced and laughed and jigged. He
sang the songs that had "taken" so well. He went through certain
gestures and then deliberately exaggerated them, in a high good-humor.
He was as young again as on the day when he had signed his first
contract. He puffed out his chest, looked at himself in the glass with
mock seriousness, and then, when the pent-up good feeling burst out in
his merry eye, he winked it gleefully and said: "Oh, you divvil, you!
You old blatherskiting divvil!"

At half-past four he went down to the corner and bought a copy of the
_Star_, the late edition which had the dramatic news in it.

There it was! He felt like jumping up in the air and whooping the length
of the street. On the editorial page it was. His name was in the
headlines! Beneath, in the article itself, almost every other word
seemed to be Barnes. It praised him here, it admired him there, it
thanked him, it congratulated him, it asserted that he had saved the
night for four hundred newsboys. He was so anxious to read it through
and to read it fast that he skipped from paragraph to paragraph. There
was over a column of it! He hurried back up to the room; and then
regretted that he had not stopped to buy more copies of the paper. He
locked the door and spread the paper out on the little center-table. His
heart and breath almost stopped as he read the good words slowly
through. When he had finished, he threw the paper aside and bounded into
the middle of the room.

"Press agent, hey?" he laughed. "Press agent! I guess yes! A small
matter of a column and a quarter; that's all. _Only_ a column and a
quarter about Harry Barnes! Wonder what Sanderson will thi