"It wasn't a game, my son," says Whity. "It was a mission in life,--to
get things printed about himself. Had no more modesty about it, you
know, than a circus press agent. Perfectly frank and ingenuous, Virgie
was. He'd just come and ask you to put it in that he was a great
man--just like that! The chief used to froth at the mouth on sight of
him. But Virgie looked funny to me in those days. I used to jolly him
along, smoke his Coronas, let him take me out to swell feeds. Then
when they gave Merrow charge of the Sunday side, just for a josh I did
a half-page special about Virgie, called him the sculptor poet, threw
in some views of him in his studio, and quoted some of his verse that
I'd fixed up. It got by. Virgie was so pleased he wanted to give a
banquet for me; but I got him to go in on a little winter wheat flier
instead. He didn't drop much. After that I'd slip in a paragraph
about him now and then, always calling him the sculptor poet. The tag
stuck. Other papers began to use it; until, first thing I knew, Virgie
was getting away with it. Honest, I just invented him. And now he
passes for the real thing!"

"Where you boobed, then, was in not filin' copyright papers," says I.
"But how does he make it pay?"

"He doesn't," says Whity. "Listen, Son, and I will divulge the hidden
mystery in the life of T. Virgil Bunn. Cheese factories! Half a dozen
or more of 'em, up Schoharie way. Left to him, you know, by Pa Bunn; a
coarse, rough person, I am told, who drank whey out of a five-gallon
can, but was cute enough to import Camembert labels and make his own
boxes. He passed on a dozen years ago; but left the cheese factories
working night shifts. Virgie draws his share quarterly. He tried a
year or two at some Rube college, and then went abroad to loiter.
While there he exposed himself to the sculptor's art; but it didn't