of Matilda Herron, John Wilkes
Booth, and others who played in that theatre. Father was an
orator of considerable ability, and I remember him, for the
amusement of my mother, reciting long speeches from Kotzebue,
Schiller, and Shakespeare. In his association with the theatre
he took me very early to plays, and I have always been an
attendant; consequently dialogue seemed the most natural
literary vehicle. I found later that this impression was
justified when I discovered that the most telling things
in Homer and later Greek poets and philosophy were in
dialogue--that this was true of Confucius and of Christ.

"I began writing plays when I was about fourteen years of age.
When I was sixteen and seventeen, an amateur company that I
organized played in certain railway centres on the old North
Missouri Railway, for the benefit of local unions of the
working men. In 1882, I made a dramatization of Mrs. Burnett's
'Editha's Burglar'. With this as a curtain-raiser, and a
rather slap-stick farce called 'Combustion', I made a tour of
the country with a company I organized, and with which I ran
in debt several thousand dollars. In 1889, a four-act version
of 'The Burglar', arranged by me, was played in New York, and
was successful, and since that time my royalties have enabled
me to give my attention on the business side exclusively to
play-writing.

"You ask why everybody who knows me is my friend? I might
answer laconically that it was because they did not know
me thoroughly, but, dismissing that defensive assumption of
modesty, and making such self-inquiry as I can, I think I
have a capacity for companionship from the fact that I was
painfully poor as a kid. My consecutive schooling stopped
when I was ten. I gave up all attempt to attend school even
irregularly, when I was thirteen. Between that age and my
twenty-second year, I worked in various sections of the
freight departments of railways. Most of the mid-day meals
of that time I took from a tin-bucket. This meal was in the
company of freight-handlers on the platform, men recruited
almost exclusively from the Irish at that time in the
middle West; or the meal was with the brakemen in the switch
shanties, these brakemen generally Americans rather near the
soil; or was with the engineers and firemen in their cabs,