think of it, I believe it was. Anyway, in
February, 1916, he turned up in Garden City, Long Island, where I first
had the excitement of clapping eyes on him. Some of the adventures of
that spring and summer may be inferred from "Memories of a Manuscript."
Others took place in the austere lunch cathedral known at the press of
Doubleday, Page & Company as the "garage," or on walks that summer
between the Country Life Press and the neighboring champaigns of
Hempstead. The full story of the Porrier's Corner Club, of which Mr.
Holliday and myself are the only members, is yet to be told. As far as I
was concerned it was love at first sight. This burly soul, rumbling
Johnsonianly upon lettered topics, puffing unending Virginia cigarettes,
gazing with shy humor through thick-paned spectacles--well, on Friday,
June 23, 1916, Bob and I decided to collaborate in writing a farcical
novel. It is still unwritten, save the first few chapters. I only
instance this to show how fast passion proceeded.

It would not surprise me if at some future time Mrs. Bedell's boarding
house, on Jackson Street in Hempstead, becomes a place of pilgrimage for
lovers of the essay. They will want to see the dark little front room on
the ground floor where Owd Bob used to scatter the sheets of his essays
as he was retyping them from a huge scrapbook and grooming them for a
canter among publishers' sanhedrim. They will want to see (but will not,
I fear) the cool barrel-room at the back of George D. Smith's tavern, an
ale-house that was blithe to our fancy because the publican bore the
same name as that of a very famous dealer in rare books. Along that
pleasant bar, with its shining brass scuppers, Bob and I consumed many
beakers of well-chilled amber during that warm summer. His urbanolatrous
soul pined for the city, and he used in those days to expound the
doctrine that the suburbanite really has to go to town in order to get
fresh air.

In September, 1916, Holliday's health broke down. He had been feeling
poorly most of the summer, and continuous hard work induced a spell of
nervous depression. Very wisely he went back to Indianapolis to rest.
After a good lay-off he tackled the Tarkington book, which was written
in Indianapolis the following winter and spring. And "Walking-Stick
Papers" began to go the rounds.

I have alluded more than once to Mr. Holliday's book on Tarkington. This
original, mellow, convivial, informal and yet soundly argued critique