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man; had a good bass voice and sang well; was a good dancer and skater; played an interesting game of cards, and was preéminently an entertainer. There were no wall flowers to Porter, and the girl who went with him never lacked for attention.

“The Hill City Quartette formed the centre of the Social Circle in which W. S. P. was the central figure during the period of this writing.

“If W. S. P. at this time had any ambitions as a writer, he never mentioned it to me. I do not recall that he was fond of reading. One day I quoted some lines to him from a poem by John Alexander Smith. He made inquiry about the author, borrowed the book, and committed to memory a great many passages from it, but I do not recall ever having known him to read any other book. I asked him one day why he never read fiction. His reply was: ‘That it was all tame compared with the romance in his own life,’—which was really true.

“Mr. Porter was very careful in the use and selection of language. He rarely used slang, and his style in ordinary conversation was very much purer and more perfect than it is in his writings. This can be accounted for in the fact that he was an unusually polished gentleman, but writing in the first person, the character which he selects to represent himself appears to be along a much lower and commoner line than he himself actually lived; but, on the other hand, the stories that he writes and the quaint way he has of putting things were largely characteristic