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as though they had been drugged. There was quite a time at the court-martial next morning, at which the Corporal and his body were given extra duty for their inglorious behaviour on the previous night, but no one ever knew our connection with the story.”

But the lure of the pen was getting too strong for Will Porter to resist. Life as a teller in the First National Bank of Austin was too routine not to be relieved by some outlet for his love of fun and for his creative literary instinct. An opportunity opened to buy a printing outfit, and he seized it and used it for a year to issue the Rolling Stone, a weekly paper that suggested even then his later method as a humourist and as a photographic portrayer of odd types of humanity. Dr. D. Daniels—“Dixie” he was to Will Porter—now a dentist in Galveston, Texas, was his partner in this enterprise, and his story of that year of fun gives also a picture of Will Porter’s habit of studying human nature at first hand—a habit that later carried him into many quaint byways of New York and into many even more quaint and revealing byways of the human heart. Here is Dr. Daniels’s story:

“It was in the spring of 1894 that I floated into Austin,” said Daniels, “and I got a place in the State printing office. I had been working there for a short time when I heard that a man named Porter had bought out the old Iconoclast plant—known everywhere as Brann’s Iconoclast—and was looking for a