editors a chance to forget I am alive, and find at the end of the month that I am three hundred and forty dollars deeper in debt than I was before.

It has come about that people are actually offended if I don't jump into every mad goat-feather quest that is proposed. I am firmly convinced that there is now extant an Association to Prevent Butler Doing a Full Day's Work. I don't want to seem egotistical, but I am now of the opinion that the Kaiser started the war in order to make it seem necessary for me to make Four-Minute speeches on Food Conservation, Give Your Binoculars, and Buy a Thrift Stamp.

Of course, all our patriotic, Liberty Loan, Red Cross, Thrift Stamp side-lining isn't goat-feathering. The genuine variety is eagle-feather gathering, and I am as proud of my eagle-feathers as I am sour on my goat-feathers.

Now it is a fine thing to be treasurer of the Flushing Hospital, and it is a fine thing to be president of the Flushing Country Club, but the goat-feathers pall when you know that the reason you were given those glories was because nobody else would take them. It's a "grand and glorious feelin'" to know you can take some affair and make it a success, or a near-success; but it is not business. A man may make a success of a Flushing Public Playground and not be making a success of himself. He may be making a goat of himself. The chances are ten to one that he is making a goat of himself.

I'll never get the Pulitzer prize for the best novel or for the best play, but if there was a Pulitzer prize for the greatest human goat nobody else would be in the running. I have not got goat-feathers by the dozen or by the pound—I have them by the bale. I estimate that if all my goat-feathers were placed end to end they would reach from the bread line to the poor-house.

It is just possible that by this time you may gather that I have a grouch on myself. If so, you are right. To-day I am forty-nine years and six months old, and as a bright and shining literary light I am exactly where I was twelve years ago. I am twelve years older and have that much less time in which to complete the joy of making good as one of the great American authors. Presently the infirmities of age will begin to gnaw at me, the moths will ruin my flossy collection of goat-feathers, all those who now pat me on the back because they can make use of me free of charge will forget that I am alive, and my executors will shake their heads and say, "Ain't it too bad he left so little!"

Distraction isn't really good for a man if he wants to reach a goal. No salesman ever got very far by carrying too many side lines. The poorest sort of monopoly for any man to undertake is a monopoly of goat-feathers.

No man in the world had a better chance to make himself the Great American Humorist than I had when I wrote "Pigs is Pigs." I had a good, solid foundation of fairly good humorous work under it and the little story had a wonderful success. The thing for me to have done then was to stick to humor, regardless of anything. I have written dainty stories, sympathetic stories, serious stories, all kinds of stories, but not many humorous stories. It is surprising how often editors have had to announce "A story that shows this famous humorist in an entirely new vein."

Taking literature as a business, I can say that a humorist should have no "new vein." Neither does a plumber succeed as a plumber by spending a large share of his working hours making violins. No one ever succeeds by allowing himself to be deflected from the most important business of life, which is making the most of the best that is in him. Even a cow does better if she sticks close to the business of eating grass and chewing the cud. When she starts in to learn to whistle like a catbird and to flit from field to field like a butterfly it is safe to say she is no longer a success in life. When a cow strays from plain milk-producing methods and begins climbing trees and turning somersaults, she may be more picturesque, but she is gathering nothing