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complain that the E string was broken, but no one would believe her, and pretty soon all of us would be singing the ‘Swanee River’ and ‘In the Evening by the Moonlight’ and—oh, gol darn it, what’s the use of wishing.”

Will Porter found a new kind of life in Texas—a life that filled his mind with that rich variety of types and adventures which later was translated into his stories. Here he got—from observation, and not from experience, as has often been said, for he was never a cowboy—the originals of his Western characters and Western scenes. He looked on at the more picturesque life about him rather than shared in it; though through his warm sympathy and his vivid imagination he entered into its spirit as completely as any one who had fully lived its varied parts.

It was while he was living on the Hall ranch, to which he had gone in search of health, that he wrote—and at once destroyed—his first stories of Western life. And it was there, too, that he drew the now famous series of illustrations for a book that never was printed. The author of that book, “Uncle Joe” Dixon, was a prospector in the bonanza mining days in Colorado. Now he is a newspaper editor in Florida; and he has lately told, for the survivors of Will Porter’s friends of that period, the story of the origin of these drawings. His narrative illustrates anew the remarkable impression that Will Porter’s quaint