e in a community supposedly inhabited by successful
and superior men of letters he posed as a farmer at times, mowing and
cocking hay as became a Western plow-boy; and also, as the mood moved
him, and as became a great and secluded writer, working in a den
entirely surrounded by books in fine leather bindings (!) and being
visited by those odd satellites of the scriptic art who see in genius of
this type the _summum bonum_ of life. It was the thing to do at that
time, for a writer to own a farm and work it. Horace had. One individual
in particular, a man of genuine literary and critical ability and great
taste in the matter of all the arts but with no least interest in or
tolerance for the simplicities of effort, came here occasionally, as I
heard, to help him pile hay, and this in a silk shirt and a monocle; a
second--and a most fascinating intellectual _flaneur_, who, however, had
no vision or the gift of dreams--came to eat, drink, talk of many things
to be done, to steal a few ideas, borrow a little money perhaps or
consume a little morphine, and depart; a third came to spout of his
success in connection with plays, or his proposed successes; a fourth to
paint a picture, urged on by L----; a fifth to compose rural verse; a
sixth, a broker or race-track tout or city bar-tender (for color, this
last), to marvel that one of L----'s sense, or any one indeed, should
live in the country at all. There were drinking bouts, absolute
drunkenness, in which, according to the Johnsonian tradition and that of
Messieurs Rabelais and Moliere, the weary intellect and one's guiding
genius were immersed in a comforting Lethe of rye.

Such things cost money, however. In addition, my young friend, due to a
desire no doubt to share in the material splendors of his age (a
doctrine M---- was ever fond of spouting--and as a duty, if you please),
had saddled himself, for a time at least, with an apartment in an
exclusive square on the East Side, the rent of which was a severe drain.
Before this there had been, and after it were still, others, obligations
too much for him to bear financially, all in the main taken for show,
that he might be considered a literary success. Now and again (so I was
told by several of his intimates), confronted by a sudden exhaustion of
his bank balance, he would leave some excellent apartment house or
neighborhood, where for a few months he had been living in grand style,
extracting his furniture as best he might,