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“For some reason or other that issue alienated every German in Austin from the Rolling Stone, and cost us more than we were able to figure out in subscriptions and advertisements.

“Another mistake Porter made was when he let himself be dragged into a San Antonio political fight—the O’Brien-Callaghan mayoralty campaign. He was pulled into this largely through a broken-down English writer, whose name, as I remember, was Henry Rider Taylor. How Taylor had any influence over him I never was able to make out, for he used constantly to make fun of him. ‘Here comes that man Taylor,’ he’d say. ‘Got a diamond on him as big as a two-bit piece and shinin’ like granulated sugar.’ But he went into the political scrap just the same, and it cost him more than it was worth.

“We got out one feature of the paper that used to meet with pretty general approval. It was a page gotten up in imitation of a backwoods country paper, and we christened it The Plunkville Patriot. That idea has been carried out since then in a dozen different forms, like The Hogwallow Kentuckian, and The Bingville Bugle, to give two of the prominent examples. Porter and I used to work on this part of the paper nights and Sundays. I would set the type for it, as there was a system to all of the typographical errors that we made, and I couldn’t trust any one else to set it up as we wanted it.

“Porter used to think up some right amusing features for this part of the paper. I remember that