will gladly exchange it if you will let me know when I may call on you.

May I not add that I am a great admirer of your verse? Have you ever
tried any musical comedy lyrics? I think that I could get you in on the
ground floor in the show game, as I know a young man who has written
several songs which E.E. Rice has said he would like to use in his next
comic opera--provided he can get words to go with them.

But we can discuss all this at our meeting, which I hope will be soon,
as your hat looks like hell on me.

Yours respectfully,

ROBERT C. BENCHLEY.

I am quite sure that this letter was mailed, as I find an entry in my
diary of that date which reads:

"Mailed a letter to J.G. Whittier. Cloudy and cooler."

Furthermore, in a death-bed confession, some ten years later, one Mary
F. Rourke, a servant employed in the house of Dr. Agassiz, with whom
Whittier was bunking at the time, admitted that she herself had taken a
letter, bearing my name in the corner of the envelope, to the poet at
his breakfast on the following morning.

But whatever became of it after it fell into his hands, I received no
reply. I waited five days, during which time I stayed in the house
rather than go out wearing the Whittier gray derby. On the sixth day I
wrote him again, as follows: