hoax. He was then writing for an audience of county papers and
never dreamed that this whimsical bit of fooling would be carried
beyond such boundaries. It was suggested by these circumstances.

He was inwardly distressed by the belief that his failure to get
the magazines to accept his verse was due to his obscurity, while
outwardly he was harassed to desperation by the junior editor of
the rival paper who jeered daily at his poetical pretensions.
So, to prove that editors would praise from a known source what
they did not hesitate to condemn from one unknown, and to silence
his nagging contemporary, he wrote Leonainie in the style of
Poe, concocting a story, to accompany the poem, setting forth how
Poe came to write it and how all these years it had been lost to
view. In a few words Mr. Riley related the incident and then
dismissed it. "I studied Poe's methods. He seemed to have a
theory, rather misty to be sure, about the use of 'm's' and 'n's'
and mellifluous vowels and sonorous words. I remember that I was
a long time in evolving the name Leonainie, but at length the
verses were finished and ready for trial.

"A friend, the editor of The Kokomo Dispatch, undertook the
launching of the hoax in his paper; he did this with great
editorial gusto while, at the same time, I attacked the
authenticity of the poem in The Democrat. That diverted all
possible suspicion from me. The hoax succeeded far too well, for
what had started as a boyish prank became a literary discussion
nation-wide, and the necessary expose had to be made. I was
appalled at the result. The press assailed me furiously, and
even my own paper dismissed me because I had given the
'discovery' to a rival."