ad refrained from offering his "Sea Lyrics" for publication,
until driven to it by starvation. After having been rejected by a dozen
magazines, they had come to rest in The Globe office. There were thirty
poems in the collection, and he was to receive a dollar apiece for them.
The first month four were published, and he promptly received a cheek for
four dollars; but when he looked over the magazine, he was appalled at
the slaughter. In some cases the titles had been altered: "Finis," for
instance, being changed to "The Finish," and "The Song of the Outer Reef"
to "The Song of the Coral Reef." In one case, an absolutely different
title, a misappropriate title, was substituted. In place of his own,
"Medusa Lights," the editor had printed, "The Backward Track." But the
slaughter in the body of the poems was terrifying. Martin groaned and
sweated and thrust his hands through his hair. Phrases, lines, and
stanzas were cut out, interchanged, or juggled about in the most
incomprehensible manner. Sometimes lines and stanzas not his own were
substituted for his. He could not believe that a sane editor could be
guilty of such maltreatment, and his favorite hypothesis was that his
poems must have been doctored by the office boy or the stenographer.
Martin wrote immediately, begging the editor to cease publishing the
lyrics and to return them to him.

He wrote again and again, begging, entreating, threatening, but his
letters were ignored. Month by month the slaughter went on till the
thirty poems were published, and month by month he received a check for
those which had appeared in the current number.

Despite these various misadventures, the memory of the White Mouse forty-
dollar check sustained him, though he was driven more and more to hack-
work. He discovered a bread-and-butter field in the agricultural
weeklies and trade journals, though among the religious weeklies he found
he could easily starve. At his lowest ebb, when his black suit was in
pawn, he made a ten-strike--or so it seemed to him--in a prize contest
arranged by the County Committee of the Republican Party. There were
three branches of the contest, and he entered them all, laughing at
himself bitterly the while in that he was driven to such straits to live.
His poem won the first prize of ten dollars, his campaign song the second
prize of five dollars, his essay on the principles of the Republican
Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars. Wh