Department, Groom of the Second Floor Front, and Registrar. I can beat that all to pieces.

When I wake in the morning as President of the Authors' League Fund I can give some attention to my work as Publicity Manager of the Liberty Loan Committee while preparing to devote an hour or two to the Secretaryship of the Armenian Relief and the Treasurership of the Volunteer Committee for the Fatherless Children of France, before I consider my duties as Vice-President of the Flushing Savings and Loan and as Vice-President, Director and Member of the Discount Committee of the Flushing National Bank. As a Councillor and Member of the Executive Committee of the Authors' League, and one of the Membership Committee of the City Club, Governor of the Tuscarora Club and Publicity Manager for the Flushing Red Cross, Flushing Red Cross Drive and Queensboro Red Cross Drive I can put in a few hours of goat-feather gathering. Night may come without my having to do any real work, but if not I can avoid it and accumulate a few more goat-feathers as Member of the Book Committee and Executive Committee of the Queensboro Public Library, Member of the Queensboro Committee on Training Camp Activities, Executive Committeeman of the Vigilantes, Authors' Committeeman of the American Defense Society, and so on for hours and hours and hours. I am a member of everything but the Mothers' Club of Public School 20, and everything takes time from my legitimate work. I estimate that in the last twenty years I have gathered twenty thousand pounds of goat-feathers at a cost of about five dollars a pound, and the whole lot is worth about twenty cents.

What I marvel at is that I make a living at all. My telephone rings seven thousand eight hundred and six times a day, and only once in the last eight years has it been rung by any one who wanted to buy a story from me. The other eighty-two million times it was rung by people who wanted me to gather a new crop of goat-feathers.

At one time I moved out to the barn to get away from the telephone. The result was that I had to come down out of the second story of the barn, walk across my property, enter the house, and go upstairs every time the telephone rang. I did this eighty-two times a day, and then moved back to the house and had an extension telephone put in my workroom so close to my desk that every time I flexed a muscle I knocked the 'phone off its table. This made it much handier for the goat-feather distributers, so they called me up oftener. They call me before I am out of bed, when I am in the bathtub, and after I go to bed. Usually they call me to the 'phone and then tell me to wait a minute until Mr. Jonesky comes. The favorite times for calling me are when I am in the bathtub, when I am at meals, and when I am trying to concentrate on my writing.

I am not blaming any one for this. I did not have to rent a telephone. I could have let people come to the house. A great many do come to the house. On the average, it takes the person who comes to the house just one hour to state a proposition that could be put in a six-word telegram or 'phoned in one minute. The visitor always begins with a few neat remarks about "Pigs and Pigs," which is not the name of the story, tells how his grandmother laughed over it until she swallowed her false teeth, explains that his grandmother was one of the Tootlecoms of Worcester, but married into the Blahblah family. About half an hour later the visitor remarks, "I know you are very busy and I hate to ask you, but——" Then he asks me to do some little trifle like raising $80,000,000 in Flushing for the War Fund of the One-Legged Gardeners' League, which has a plan for planting sweet peas in the trenches in Mesopotamia. "We know you can do it," he says pleasantly. I know I can do it, too. I feel the great urge of ability rise within me. I don't care a hang for Mesopotamia, or for sweet peas in the trenches there; but it is something I can do, and I go ahead and do it. I gather two quarts of red, white, and blue goat-feathers, give eighteen magazine