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printer to go into the game with him. I went around to see him, and that was the first time I met O. Henry. Porter had been a clerk in the Texas Land Office and a teller in the First National Bank in Austin, and when W. C. Brann went to Waco decided to buy out his plant and run a weekly humorous paper.

“I talked things over with him, the proposition looked good, and we formed a partnership then and there. We christened the paper the Rolling Stone after a few discussions, and in smaller type across the full-page head we printed ‘Out for the moss.’ Which is exactly what we were out for. Our idea was to run this weekly with a lot of current events treated in humorous fashion, and also to run short sketches, drawings, and verse. I had been doing a lot of chalk-plate work and the specimens I showed seemed to make a hit with Porter. Those chalkplates were the way practically all of our cuts were printed.

“Porter was one of the most versatile men I had ever met. He was a fine singer, could write remarkably clever stuff under all circumstances, and was a good hand at sketching. And he was the best mimic I ever saw in my life. He was one of the genuine democrats that you hear about more often than you meet. Night after night, after we would shut up shop, he would call to me to come along and ‘go bumming.’ That was his favourite expression for the night-time prowling in which we indulged. We would wander through streets and alleys, meeting with