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Too late! Those black little dots won't get through my forehead. It has grown too hard for them, I suppose." I attempted to reassure him, but in vain When the next cloak season came I slunk back to work. I felt degraded. But I earned high wages and my good spirits soon returned. I firmly made up my mind, come what might, to take the college-entrance examination the very next fall.
Walter Babson was born in Kansas. His father was a farmer and horse-doctor, a heavy drinker, an eccentric who joined every radical political movement. In a country school, just such a one as Una had taught, then in high school in a near-by town, Walter had won all the prizes for essays and debating, and had learned a good deal about Shakespeare and Cæsar and George Washington. Also he had learned a good deal about drinking beer, smoking manfully, and tempting the giggling girls who hung about the "deepot." He ran away from high school, and in the most glorious years of his life worked his way down the Mississippi and up the Rio Grande, up to Alaska and down to Costa Rica, a butt and jester for hoboes, sailors, longshoremen, miners, cow-punchers, lunch-room owners, and proprietors of small newspapers. He learned to stick type and run a press. He returned to Kansas and worked on a country newspaper, studying poetry and college-entrance requirements in the evening. He had, at this time, the not entirely novel idea that "he ought to be able to make a lot of good fiction out of all his experiences." Actually, he had no experiences, because he had no instinct for beauty. The proof is that he read quite solemnly and reverently a vile little periodical for would-be authors, which reduced authorship to a way of earning one's living by supplying editors with cheap but ingenious items to fill space. It put literature on a level with keeping a five-and-ten-cent store. But Walter conned its pompous trade journal discussions as to whether the name and address of the author should be typed on the left or the right side of the 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.
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.
Marshall-Smith explained further: "To keep him up in his studies. He doesn't learn anything in his school, you know. They never do. It's only for the atmosphere the sports; you know, they play cricket where he is now and the desirable class of boys he meets.... All the boys have tutors in vacation times to coach them for the college-entrance examinations."
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