.. who hobnobbed, not as a democrat, but as
aristocratic as the best of them, with princes, kings, emperors, in his
grim, forbidding dignity.
This at least presented bigness and romance!
* * * * *
"Want to meet Uncle Bill?" and Mackworth led me into a close-shut room
blue-thick with smoke....
I coughed and choked. A fire extinguisher should have preceded our
entry.
There sat--the lumbering trot of his typewriter heard long before he
assumed visible, hazy outline--William Struthers, known to the newspaper
world as "Old Uncle Bill," the writer of daily prose-verse squibs on the
homely virtues, the exalter of the commonplaces of life, the deifier of
the ordinary.
Uncle Bill's head of strong, black hair stood upright like thick wire.
His thick, stubby fingers trotted like cart horses on and on. He stopped
and drew up a chair for me.
"Of course I ain't calling my stuff poetry," he began deprecatingly,
"but I do a lot of good for folks ... folks read my stuff when they
ain't got time to read the real poets."
Instead of flattering him, I gave him, frankly but gently, my opinion
of the cornfed school of literature, easing the sting by inferring that
he without doubt had bigger things up his sleeve than his so-called
prose poems.
What I said struck the right chord.
"Of course a fellow has to make a living first.
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