ccurrence Up a Side Street' will enthrall you.

"Thus in Irvin Cobb we find Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Edgar Allan Poe at
their best. Reckon with these potentialities in the future. Speculate, if
you will, upon the sort of a novel that is bound, some day, to come from
his pen. There seem to be no pinnacles along the horizon of the literary
future that are beyond him. If he uses his pen for an Alpine stock, the
Matterhorn is his.

"There are critics and reviewers who do not entirely agree with me
concerning Cobb. But they will.

"As I write these lines I recall a conversation I had with Irvin Cobb on
the hurricane deck of a Fifth Avenue 'bus one bleak November afternoon,
1911. We had met at the funeral of Joseph Pulitzer, in whose employ we had
served in the past.

"Cobb was in a reflective mood, chilled to the marrow, and not
particularly communicative.

"At the junction of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street we were held up
by congested traffic. After a little manoeuvring on the part of a mounted
policeman, the Fifth Avenue tide flowed through and onward again.

"'It reminds me of a river,' said Cobb, 'into which all humanity is drawn.
Some of these people think because they are walking up-stream they are
getting out of it. But they never escape. The current is at work on them.
Some day they will get tired and go down again, and finally pass out to
sea. It is the same with real rivers. They do not flow uphill.'

"He lapsed into silence.

"'What's on your mind?' I inquired.

"'Nothing in particular,' he said, scanning the banks of the great
municipal stream, 'except that I intend to write a novel some day about a
boy born at the headwaters. Gradually he floats down through the
tributaries, across the valleys, swings into the main stream, and docks
finally at one of the cities on its banks. This particular youth was a
great success--in the beginning. Every door was open to him. He had
position, brains, and popularity to boot. He married brilliantly. And then
The Past, a trivial, unimportant Detail, lifted its head and barked at
him. He was too sensitive to bark back. Thereupon it bit him and he
collapsed.'

"Again Cobb ceased talking. For some reason--indefinable--I respected his
silence. Two blocks further down he took up the thread of his story
again:

"'--and one evening, just about sundown, a river hand, sitting on a
stringpiece of a dock, saw a derby hat bobbing in the muddy Mississippi,
floating unst